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The importance of effective surgical wound care cannot never be underestimated. Poorly managing surgical wounds may cause many serious complications. Thus, it raises the necessity to develop a patient-friendly self-care system which can help both patients and medical professionals to ensure the state of the surgical wounds without any special medical equipment. In this paper, a surgical wound assessment system for self-care is proposed. The proposed system is designed to enable patients capture surgical wound images of themselves by using a mobile device and upload these images for analysis. Combining image-processing and machine-learning techniques, the proposed method is composed of four phases. First, images are segmented into superpixels where each superpixel contains the pixels in the similar color distribution. Second, these superpixels corresponding to the skin are identified and the area of connected skin superpixels is derived. Third, surgical wounds will be extracted from this area based on the observation of the texture difference between skin and wounds. Lastly, state and symptoms of surgical wound will be assessed. Extensive experimental results are conducted. With the proposed method, more than 90% state assessment results are correct and more than 91% symptom assessment results consistent with the actual diagnosis. Moreover, case studies are provided to show the advantage and limitation of this system. These results show that this system could perform well in the practical self-care scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design and the electric and emission characteristics of a handheld air plasma spray are presented. The plasma is generated by 60-Hz periodic discharges between two concentrically cylindrical electrodes. A ring magnet is used to rotate arc discharges, which sprays outward by an airflow. The rotation of arc discharges keeps the generated plasma in nonequilibrium state and at relatively low temperature (\sim \!\!55\ ^\circ\C). The plasma effluent still contains high-energy electrons which dissociate molecular oxygen into atomic oxygen. The emission spectroscopy of the plasma plume reveals that the plasma effluent, which carries abundant atomic oxygen, extends from the cap of the plasma spray about 25 mm. Using pigs as the animal model, in vivo tests of stopping wound bleeding and postoperative observation of wound healing by this air plasma spray were performed. The results show that the bleeding from a cut to an ear artery is stopped swiftly; this air plasma spray also shortens wound healing time to about half (from 14 days to 8 days) after stopping the bleeding of a cross-cut wound in the ham area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A portable low temperature air plasma torch was used to control bleeding from wounds. As animal models, two pigs were used in the tests: one for the plasma treatment, and the other as the untreated control. Plasma effects on the bleeding times of three types of wounds (straight cut and cross cut in the ham area, and a hole in the saphenous vein of an ear) were examined. The results were that this plasma torch shortened the bleeding time for these three types of wounds from about 3 min to 18 s, about 4 min to 13 s, and 88 s to 15 s, respectively. Emission spectroscopy of the torch was performed to explore the reactive species carried by the plasma effluent of the torch. The results show that this torch carries abundant reactive atomic oxygen (RAO), which is the dominant reactive species in the plasma effluent. RAO can activate erythrocyte–platelet interactions to enhance blood coagulation for plug formation. The present tests indicate that RAO can also penetrate through the skin surrounding the wound to block capillary blood flow to the wound. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]