About WISDOM
Wound Imaging Software and Digital platfOrM to detect and prioritise non-healing surgical wounds
Funded by:
Wound infections after surgery
A surgical site infection (SSI), or wound infection, is an infection that develops in the wound site area following surgery. Around 5% of patients will develop an SSI. Many patients with a wound infection will have to stay in hospital longer and are more likely to be re-admitted. Depending on the severity of the infection, they can be treated with wound cleaning or antibiotics, with the most severe infections requiring further surgery. Patients find these infections distressing and it may be months or years before they heal completely.
Most wound infections develop after patients have been discharged home from hospital after surgery. If wound infections are caught early, then they can be treated before the problem worsens and becomes harder to treat.
Wound monitoring at home
A small but increasing number of hospitals are offering patients remote wound monitoring. This is a digital service using devices such as smart phones where patients recovering at home send the hospital photos of their wound. In this way the hospital can check the patient’s wound to see if any problems such as infections are developing.
The Isla surgical wound monitoring platform
Isla is a powerful digital pathway platform for healthcare providers to support patients throughout their care journey.
Within the platform, the Isla surgical wound monitoring pathway was developed by WISDOM researchers at Guys and St Thomas’s Hospital, London and Isla. With Isla, patients are sent a pre-programmed SMS text message or email every week after surgery for one month. The text or email asks them to send a photo of their wound along with some information. The photos and information are reviewed by experts at the hospital and patients receive a response, usually within one hour, telling them that their wound looks fine, or they may have a surgical wound complication such as infection and may need further assessment or treatment. Isla uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect blurry photos and, if detected, will ‘ask’ the patient to take another photo. It also uses artificial intelligence to increase the quality of the photos. The Isla platform is very successful and is now used by several hospitals and thousands of patients.
The WISDOM Project
Having clinicians review thousands of photos of patients’ wounds is a lot of additional work and it is important that clinicians can review the photos quickly. The aim of the WISDOM project is to develop an artificial intelligence component to the Isla platform which reviews all photos and identifies photos with problems for priority review by clinicians. This means that clinicians will still review all photos and information, but will review photos identified by the AI component first. WISDOM will develop and validate the AI component and then test the AI component with patients and clinicians for safety, acceptability, economic benefit and feasibility of a larger study to measure the clinical benefits.
Funding
WISDOM is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) under its Intervention for Innovation funding stream (project reference NIHR204508)
The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR.
Sponsorship
Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital NHS Foundation Trust