Computer-based assistance of surgeons in the judgment of plastic nose surgeries (rhinoplasty)

Summary form only given, substantially as follows. The paper presents a tool which can assist surgeons in judging the success of nose surgeries. Furthermore, the tool is useful for investigating the long term development of noses which underwent plastic surgery (rhinoplasty). The described tool makes use of simple methods for the quantitative characterization of profile images of human noses. The main processing steps include image acquisition, binarization, profile extraction, profile normalization, feature extraction, and feature analysis. We introduce features that are suitable to characterize nose profiles extracted from lateral photographs of patients. Moreover, the tool can assist surgeons in a quantitative manner in judging the success of nose surgeries. It reliably detects regions where material has been added or removed, and quantitatively describes the changes. Traditionally, these changes are detected through visual inspection and are only qualitatively characterized. Thus the proposed method is useful in judging the results of surgery in a more objective and reproducible manner.