3D MORPHOMETRIC CHANGES 1 YEAR AFTER JAW SURGERY

This paper presents image processing methods for the computation of morphometric changes associated with jaw surgery, precisely locating jaw displacements and quantitatively describing the vectors of displacement. The proposed methods rely on a rigid, normalized mutual-information approach to register one image to another on anatomic structures unaltered by surgery in order to evaluate within-subject changes. After registration, the location and magnitude of changes over time are assessed via graphical overlays and calculation of the Euclidean distances between the surfaces. The resulting 3D graphical display of the magnitude of displacements between two segmentations is color-coded. The direction of displacement is shown by the mean vectors of displacement, within lines that graph connecting points of equal values. (NIDCR DE017727-02 and DE005215-26).