Image analysis of cleft lip from moire image based on symmetry analysis

Abstract

About 4% of babies in Japan suffer from congenital anomalies. Cleft lip is the most common disorder among external malformations occurring at a rate of 1 in 500 people. The goal of treatment is to recover symmetric and functional lips and nose forms. However, in the case of unilateral cleft lip where the lips and nose themselves are shifted from the midline of the face, it is difficult to set the midline which is the symmetry axis for evaluating the degree of symmetry of the face. In this paper, we propose an image processing method for extracting the midline using zebra image and shadow image which are two dimensional image created based on three dimensional analysis. Also, we evaluate the degree of asymmetry of the face by using the midline as the axis. As a result of applying the proposed method to 25 cases, which indicated that the proposed method is useful.