# Gaussian Random Fields as an Abstract Representation of Patient Metadata for Multimodal Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05214 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05214/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection 2018: A Challenge Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03368/) (2019)
- [Identifying Melanoma Images using EfficientNet Ensemble: Winning Solution to the SIIM-ISIC Melanoma Classification Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05351/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning in Diabetic Foot Ulcers Detection: A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03341/) (2020)
- [Translating Clinical Delineation of Diabetic Foot Ulcers into Machine Interpretable Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11618/) (2022)
- [Multi-modal Wound Classification using Wound Image and Location by Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06969/) (2021)
- [Integrated Image and Location Analysis for Wound Classification: A Deep Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11877/) (2023)
- [A Cloud-based Deep Learning Framework for Remote Detection of Diabetic Foot Ulcers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07763/) (2021)
- [Benefits of Linear Conditioning with Metadata for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09582/) (2021)
- [Dermoscopic Dark Corner Artifacts Removal: Friend or Foe?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13446/) (2023)
- [An Enhanced Harmonic Densely Connected Hybrid Transformer Network Architecture for Chronic Wound Segmentation Utilising Multi-Colour Space Tensor Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03359/) (2024)
- [Quantifying the Effect of Image Similarity on Diabetic Foot Ulcer Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12987/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The growing rate of chronic wound occurrence, especially in patients with diabetes, has become a concerning trend in recent years. Chronic wounds are difficult and costly to treat, and have become a serious burden on health care systems worldwide. Chronic wounds can have devastating consequences for the patient, with infection often leading to reduced quality of life and increased mortality risk. Innovative deep learning methods for the detection and monitoring of such wounds have the potential to reduce the impact to both patient and clinician. We present a novel multimodal segmentation method which allows for the introduction of patient metadata into the training workflow whereby the patient data are expressed as Gaussian random fields. Our results indicate that the proposed method improved performance when utilising multiple models, each trained on different metadata categories. Using the Diabetic Foot Ulcer Challenge 2022 test set, when compared to the baseline results (intersection over union = 0.4670, Dice similarity coefficient = 0.5908) we demonstrate improvements of +0.0220 and +0.0229 for intersection over union and Dice similarity coefficient respectively. This paper presents the first study to focus on integrating patient data into a chronic wound segmentation workflow. Our results show significant performance gains when training individual models using specific metadata categories, followed by average merging of prediction masks using distance transforms. All source code for this study is available at: https://github.com/mmu-dermatology-research/multimodal-grf