MATLAB Image Processing for Plasma-Wound Interaction to Accelerate Healing and Sterilization

Plasma healing has been found to be a very powerful technique to accelerate wound healing. Through this research conducted at San Jose State University, this process was automated in an attempt to make plasma healing more efficient in material usage and cost while allowing widespread usage by reducing the need for specialists. The plasma torch was held by a 2D-traversing arm system, which used two stepper motors, each attached to a set of linear slides, for movement. Motor drivers and a Raspberry Pi microcontroller were used to control the stepper motors. The Raspberry Pi was also connected to a USB Logitech camera module, which would take pictures of the wound. In this work, a pictorial version of the wound was provided to the camera to take images and process them accordingly. A MATLAB program was used to control the arm system. The MATLAB program wirelessly received the image from the Raspberry Pi and detected the wound by scanning for the most-red area of the image. It identified the most efficient way for the arm to move by placing the tightest possible bounding box around the wound. The MATLAB program then moved the arm around this bounding box, pausing at approximately 1.5 cm intervals for around 30 seconds generally required for wound exposure. The hardware and software systems are discussed further in the following sections.