Automatic assessment of skull circumference in craniosynostosis

Abstract

The premature fusion of one or more calvarias sutures of the infant’s skull causes a common pediatric disease called craniosynostosis. This condition causes a serious deformation of the head shape and may produce a noticeable disorder in the neuropsychological development of a child and can be treated only by a surgery. The fused sutures are typically confirmed by the computed tomography (CT) imaging. The surgical outcome and overall progress of the treatment is assessed based on a clinical judgment and an additional manual measurement of the head circumference (HC) index. The research presented in this paper considered the problem of an automatic calculation of the HC index based on CT scans. In particular, algorithms for the skull segmentation, determination of the head central sagittal plane and skull landmarks used for the calculation of the HC indices are introduced.