Abstract
The newborn's skull consists of bones and fibrous, membrane-covered tissue composed of fontanels and sutures. Newborns have six fontanels at birth. Clinical assessment of the size and other variations of fontanels after birth are very important because fontanels with abnormal size and shape are indicators of several disorders such as increased intracranial pressure. The most important fontanel for clinical examination and diagnosis in newborns is the anterior fontanel. It has a rhomboid-like shape and is situated at the junction of the two parietal and two frontal bones. A clinical method commonly used to measure anterior fontanel size was first described by Popich and corresponds to the mean value of the length (anteroposterior dimension) and the width (transverse dimension). The length and width are measured on the skin of the newborn's head. In this study, we propose a method for extraction of the anterior fontanel in order to determine its dimensions on 3D computed tomography (CT) images of newborns. The proposed algorithm was applied to CT images from eleven newborns with a gestational age of 39 to 45 weeks. The mean anteroposterior and transverse diameters were 3.51 cm and 3.19 cm, respectively. The mean anterior fontanel size and area were 3.35 cm and 10.5 cm 2 , respectively.
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