Current difficulties and the possible future directions in scar assessment

The quantitative assessment of the results of burn management is notoriously difficult. With the focus changing from survival to cosmetic and functional outcome, the scar assessments are increasingly important. The scar is a sum of the injury and all subsequent interventions on the way to healing. As such it is a complex structure, abnormal in its colour, depth, contour and pliability. To develop a quantitative system we believe it is vital to be able to track accurately an area of injury through time. Further, that physiological data acquired by a number of measurement tools be fused accurately to the morphologically correct information.