An image processing system for cephalometric analysis and measurements

Abstract

Computerized cephalometric information enhance clinical and research studies by making the information accessible, consistent, and statistically valid in comparative studies. Image processing technique was used widely to solve many problems in medical images. This study has developed a new system to computerize the manual process of cephalometric. The system has contained three modules to perform cephalometric analysis and measurements. The filtering module was developed to enhance the contrast of x-ray images; the locating landmark module was developed to identify the interest points in x-ray images manually; and the measurement module was developed to perform angular and linear measurements of cephalometric. The filters make x-ray image clearer that landmark points can be easily identified. The developed system has reduced the processing time for obtaining results of cephalometric measurements for more than 10 times of the manual methods. The results showed a great accuracy between manual and automatic methods using this system.