Computer aided monitoring of fibrous dysplasia disease in craniofacial bones

This paper presents a method to assist the monitoring of bone remodeling in annual CT scans of craniofacial bones performed in patients with polyostotic fibrous dysplasia. The method combines several advanced computer vision and graphics techniques, including image segmentation, surface reconstruction, image registration, and image fusion. The method is fully automatic and achieves sub-pixel accuracy. Several metrics were designed to quantitate the bone changes between two studies, and were compared to a visual assessment of bone involvement The quantitative analysis provides physicians a useful tool to evaluate the disease development and monitor the treatment progress.