An integration of statistical deformable model and finite element method for bone-related soft tissue prediction in orthognathic surgery planning

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel statistical deformable model for bone-related soft-tissue prediction, which we called Br-SDM. In Br-SDM, we have integrated Finite Element Model(FEM) and Statistical Deformable Model(SDM) to achieve both accurate and efficient prediction for orthognathic surgery planning. By combining FEM-based surgery simulation for sample generation and SDM for soft tissue prediction, we are able to capture the prior knowledge of bone-related soft-tissue deformation for different surgical plans. Then the post-operative appearance can be predicted in a more efficient way from a Br-SDM based optimization. Our experiments have shown that Br-SDM is able to give comparable soft-tissue prediction accuracy with respect to conventional FEM-based prediction while only requires 10% of its computational cost. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.