Ancient pelvis reconstruction from collapsed component bones using statistical shape models

Abstract

We propose a new method for recovering the pelvis of an ancient skeleton from its three component bones with collapsed surfaces. The proposed method uses four types of statistical shape models (SSMs) for the bones. The SSM for each bone describes the mean shape and shape variations of a class of bones. The SSMs for the three component bones are employed to restore the shapes of the component bones. The SSM for the whole pelvis provides the natural anatomical shape of the pelvis and the spatial relationship among the sacrum and the hip bones. Therefore, the three component bones are aligned by using the SSM for the pelvis. The experimental results show that our method achieves reliable reconstruction of the ancient pelvis shape despite having collapsed surfaces in its component bones.