  Wound assessment is a critical aspect of wound treatment, as the healing
progress of a wound determines the optimal approach to care. However, the
heterogeneity of burn wounds often complicates wound assessment, causing
inaccurate wound evaluation and ineffective treatment. Traditional wound
assessment methods such as Gross Area Reduction (GAR) and Percentage Area
Reduction (PAR) are prone to misinterpretation, due to irregular results.
Inaccurate wound assessment leads to higher rates of death and life-long
physical and psychological morbidities in burn patients, especially in
low-income communities that lack specialty care and medical resources.
Therefore, I propose a novel approach to wound assessment: wound healing from
the biophysical perspective of collective cell migration by analyzing cell
packing behavior. This approach was modeled through Voronoi Tessellation
simulations and applied to a wound healing system, where changes in the cell
morphology parameters of aspect ratio and shape index were plotted over time to
numerically evaluate the geometry of different cell migration packing patterns.
Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of measuring aspect ratio,
as a reduction in aspect ratio indicates that cell shapes become increasingly
rounded throughout wound closure. This is further proven when considering
physical principles in wound healing and changes in cell elongation. By placing
a microscope objective on a phone camera, it is possible to directly examine
any wound, with the calculations done on the phone as well. This efficient and
accurate mechanism can be especially useful in low-resource communities, as it
is accessible regardless of technical or medical background.
