An evaluation of active shape models for the automatic identification of cephalometric landmarks.
Hutton TJ., Cunningham S., Hammond P.
This paper describes an evaluation of the application of active shape models to cephalometric landmarking. Permissible deformations of a template were established from a training set of hand-annotated images and the resulting model was used to fit to unseen images. An evaluation of this technique in comparison to the accuracy achieved by previous methods is presented. Sixty-three randomly selected cephalograms were tested using a drop-one-out method. On average, 13 per cent of 16 landmarks were within 1 mm, 35 per cent within 2 mm, and 74 per cent within 5 mm. It was concluded that the current implementation does not give sufficient accuracy for completely automated landmarking, but could be used as a time-saving tool to provide a first-estimate location of the landmarks. The method is also of interest because it provides a framework for a range of future improvements.