Automatic Assessment of Global Craniofacial Differences between Crouzon mice and Wild-type mice in terms of the Cephalic Index

This paper presents the automatic assessment of differences between Wild-Type mice and Crouzon mice based on high-resolution 3D Micro CT data. One factor used for the diagnosis of Crouzon syndrome in humans is the cephalic index, which is the skull width/length ratio. This index has traditionally been computed by time-consuming manual measurements that prevent large-scale populational studies. In this study, an automatic method to estimate cephalic index for this mouse model of Crouzon syndrome is presented. The method is based on constructing a craniofacial atlas of Wild-type mice and then registering each mouse to the atlas using affine transformations. The skull length and width are then measured on the atlas and propagated to all subjects to obtain automatic measurements of the cephalic index. The registration accuracy was estimated by RMS landmark errors. Even though the accuracy of landmark matching is limited using only affine transformations, the errors were considered acceptable. The automatic estimation of the cephalic index was in full agreement with the gold standard measurements. Discriminant analysis of the three scaling parameters resulted in a good classification of the mouse groups.