Reliability of digital videometry and acetate tracing in measuring the surface area of cutaneous wounds.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability of digital videometry and acetate tracing in the measurement of cutaneous wound area.
METHODS: Four clinicians used both digital videometry and acetate tracing to measure five wounds that were artificially created on a cadaver specimen. In addition, the clinicians used an analog centimeter ruler to determine a rough estimate of the area of each wound. The wounds were measured a total of five times with each measurement instrument using a non-sequential repeat measures design. Associations between the three wound measurement techniques were examined with Pearson correlation coefficients. In addition, intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) were calculated for each pair of the three measurement techniques.
RESULTS: Correlation between the measurement systems for all raters combined yielded Pearson r-values of 0.93 for ruler and acetate, 0.95 for ruler and digital and 0.97 for acetate and digital. Furthermore, the average measure ICC between acetate and digital was 0.94, between acetate and ruler was 0.76 and between digital and ruler was 0.57.
CONCLUSION: These results suggest that wound area measurements obtained using digital videometry and acetate tracing are very similar and both techniques can be used interchangeably in either clinical or research settings.