Abstract
Generally inflammatory reactions induced by infusion phlebitis are assessed subjectively as a part of nursing care which is known as macroscopic findings. For achieving accurate inference from this method of subjective assessment, multiple checks by multiple persons are needed. In order to reduce the human workload of subjective evaluation, an objective assessment measure for the inflammatory reactions induced by infusion phlebitis is necessary. In this work, the first quartiles of each of the two parameters of the L＊a＊b＊ color space that represent the changes in brightness and color respectively, from the captured images of inflammatory reactions over a period of time, are used to define the features corresponding to the amount of shape change of histogram over time representing the progress or recovery of the inflammatory reaction. Next, by using multiple cases of different degrees of inflammatory reaction, an objective assessment measure based on the above definition has been proposed. It is seen in the experimental results that the proposed objective measure can assess the inflammatory reactions correctly in accordance to the results obtained by the subjective assessment.
