Segmentation and Three Dimensional Visualization of Mandible Using Active Contour and Visualization Toolkit in Craniofacial Computed Tomography Images

Abstract

Three-dimensional representation of facial bone surface is needed in the virtual surgical planning for orthognathic surgery. Segmentation of facial bone surface from computed tomography images is first step in developing the 3D model. This paper focuses on segmentation of mandible bone using active contour segmentation of Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit library. The results are given as 3D stereo lithographic image. The result is compared with the ground truth image segmented by an expert radiologist. Various evaluation metrics are used for finding the segmentation accuracy and the result has given segmentation accuracy of 97.50%. Therefore, this method can be used as an initial step in automatic cephalometric land marking, an important task in virtual surgical planning for orthognathic surgery.