Processing of MR Slices of Temporomandibular Disc for 3D Visualization

Abstract

This article deals with a segmentation of MR images in temporomandibular joint (TMJ) area. The TMJ belongs to small but the most overloaded joint of the human body. It consists of the head of the mandible and articular fossa (1). Between them is the mandibular disc. The mandibular disc is a cartilage for a force transmission. The physiological placement of the disc is on the top of the mandibular head. One of the frequent diseases is the disc dislocation from the physiological placement therefore there is a blocking of the mandibular head movement. In the worse case it can come to the total disc deformation (2). The aim of this work is to obtain the most exact image or model of the mandibular disc for the right assessment of a treatment in order to minimize the invasive surgery. There was chosen an active contour method based on level set partial difierential equation for the MR image segmentation (3,4). There was found the boundary of the mandibular disc in the noised image of low contrast with suitable parameters and initial curve without of any kind of preprocessing. The article shows our results of the segmentation of some MR slices with visible mandibular disc. These results are poised to following postprocessing which will be the 3D model of the mandibular disc creation. There are described some methods for this kind of preprocessing.