Cephalometry Analysis of Facial Soft Tissue based on MRI Images Applicable for Facial Reconstruction Surgeries

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of Bioelectric, Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, Tabriz, Iran

Abstract

Nowadays, facial plastic surgeries have increased significantly in societies due to the elimination of defects in a person's appearance caused by congenital problems, accidents and beautiful facial structure. Therefore, the development of hardware and software systems in the field of facial plastic surgeries can help to surgeons in the Cephalometry analysis of patients' faces before and after surgery. This study presents a new method in the analysis of facial reconstruction surgeries based on MRI images. The presented method includes three main parts (1) pre-processing, (2) feature extraction, and (3) feature selection. In the pre-processing step, the optimized fuzzy clustering (FCM) using reptile search algorithm (RSA) is used for image segmentation. The feature extraction phase includes: (1) using the aggregate channel features (ACF) method to locate the eyes and mouth components from the front view, (2) contour simplification (CS), (3) signal smoothing using Savitzky-Golay (SG) fitting, and (4) Hough transform. In the feature selection phase, nine anatomical landmarks of facial soft tissue are localized from the profile view. Experimental results show that the presented method has high accuracy in estimating angles and locating facial landmarks and is considered as a new method in the field of facial reconstruction surgeries. This study is effective in the developing simulation systems and can be used as a software package in hospitals and medical clinics.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

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Tabriz Journal of Electrical Engineering
Volume 55, Issue 2 - Serial Number 112
October 2025
Pages 321-331

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