Computer Vision · Healthcare · Real-world Impact

Diabetic Foot Ulcer Detection

A YOLO-based detector that flags diabetic foot ulcers at 95% accuracy — adopted by the Tamil Nadu State Government with potential reach across 10M+ patients.

Role
AI Intern
Org
Diax.AI
Timeline
May — Jul 2024
Impact
Govt-adopted
YOLOPyTorchRoboflowOpenCVData AugmentationPython

Motivation

Diabetic foot ulcers are a leading cause of preventable amputations, and early detection dramatically improves outcomes. Specialist screening doesn't scale to millions of patients — so the goal was an automated detector accurate enough for real clinical screening and deployable at population scale.

Architecture

Clinical images are annotated and augmented in Roboflow, then used to train a YOLO detector that localizes ulcers in new images for triage.

📷Clinical Images3,000+
🏷️Annotate + AugmentRoboflow
🧠YOLO TrainingPyTorch
🎯Ulcer Detection95% accuracy

From raw clinical photos to deployable triage detection.

What I built

  • A deep-learning detector for diabetic foot ulcers, now adopted by the Tamil Nadu State Government.
  • A YOLO-based detection model at 95% accuracy, with potential impact across 10M+ patients.
  • Improved robustness 15% by annotating and augmenting 3,000+ images in Roboflow.
  • Owned the full lifecycle: preprocessing, training, evaluation and deployment.

Results

95%Detection accuracy
+15%Robustness from augmentation
10M+Potential patient reach
GovtState-adopted

Challenges

  • Limited, messy medical data: careful annotation and augmentation of 3,000+ images was essential to generalize.
  • Clinical stakes: false negatives are costly, so evaluation focused on recall, not just headline accuracy.
  • Deployability: the model had to run reliably outside a research notebook for government use.

Learnings

  • Data quality beats model choice in medical CV — augmentation moved the needle more than architecture tweaks.
  • In healthcare, the right metric (recall/sensitivity) matters more than raw accuracy.
  • Real impact comes from shipping — a deployed 95% model beats a perfect notebook.
Next project
Lunar Lander — Deep RL