Construction and analysis of a head CT-scan database for craniofacial reconstruction

Abstract : This paper is devoted to the construction of a complete database which is intended to improve the implementation and the evaluation of computer-based facial reconstruction. This growing database is currently composed of $85$ head CT-scans of healthy european subjects aged 20 to 65 years old. It also includes the triangulated surfaces of the face and the skull of each subject. These surfaces are extracted from CT-scans using an original combination of image-processing techniques which are presented in the paper. Besides, a set of $39$ referenced anatomical skull landmarks were located manually on each scan. Using the geometrical information provided by triangulated surfaces, we compute facial soft-tissue depths at each known landmark positions. We report the average thickness values at each landmark and compare our measures to those of the traditional charts of Rhine et al. and of several recent in vivo studies (Manheim et al., De Greef et al. and Helmer et al.).