Towards a Non-invasive Pectus Excavatum Severity Assessment Tool Using a Linear Discriminant Analysis on 3D Optical Data

Abstract

Pectus Excavatum (PE) is a congenital anomaly of the thoracic cage, at the level of the sternal-costal plane, which consists of an inward angle of the sternum, in the direction of the spine. Its incidence, equal to 1 in 300–400 people, makes it the most frequent among thoracic malformations. For a proper care of patients suffering from PE, it is essential to monitor the progression of the disease and estimate its severity, in order to follow the course of the pathology over time and define the correct treatment. To this end, over the years, severity indexes, or chest indexes, have been introduced. Among them, in recent years, the so-called optical indices, calculated on optical scans of the patient’s chest, are gaining ground. In fact, the optical scan is faster to apply and prevents the patient from being exposed to radiation. In this work the peculiar morphological features of PE have been examined by extracting various geometric parameters, in order to develop an outpatient support tool for the evaluation of the severity of the pathology and the monitoring of its progression over time. The extracted values have been compared against a ground truth obtained through five independent surveys collected from paediatric specialists. A Linear Discriminant Analysis was performed to determine the accuracy of the classification using the proposed geometric parameters, obtaining positive results.