LINDA: Low Resource Foot Ulcer Segmentation using Local Similarity and Iterative Neural Dynamics

Abstract

Foot ulcers are a leading cause of lower limb amputation, and the highest burden often falls on low and middle income regions where specialists and computing hardware are both scarce. Wound monitoring tools are most useful there when they are accurate yet small enough to run on ordinary devices, but accuracy usually comes from heavy networks. We present LINDA, a compact model that grounds segmentation in an explicit structural prior instead of raw intensity. A Local Self-Similarity (LSS) map, computed directly from the image and stable under local lighting changes, is fused into a ResNet-34 encoder, and a small Liquid Time-Constant module refines the boundary over four iterative steps. With every model trained under one protocol on the FUSeg 2021 dataset, LINDA obtains the best Dice (86.68\%), IoU (79.67\%), and boundary accuracy (HD95 6.37 pixels) in our comparison while using only 25.70M parameters, fewer than the U-Net and transformer baselines. As the LSS map is a fixed function of the input, it exposes the structural cues the model follows in a readable form. Together this makes LINDA an accurate, inspectable, and lightweight option for wound assessment in resource-constrained care.