3D face morphology classification for medical applications

Classification of facial morphology traits is an important problem for many medical applications, especially with regard to determining associations between facial morphological traits or facial abnormalities and genetic variants. A modern approach to the classification of facial characteristics(traits) is to use three-dimensional facial images. In clinical practice, classification is usually performed manually, which makes the process very tedious, time-consuming and prone to operator error. Also using simple landmark-to-landmark facial measurements may not accurately represent the underlying complex three-dimensional facial shape. This thesis presents the first automatic approach for classification and categorisation of facial morphological traits with application to lips and nose traits. It also introduces new 3D geodesic curvature features obtained along the geodesic paths between 3D facial anthropometric landmarks. These geometric features were used for lips and nose traits classification and categorisation. Finally, the influence of the discovered categories on the facial physical appearance are analysed using a new visualisation method in order to gain insight into suitability of categories for description of the underlying facial traits. The proposed approach was tested on the ALSPAC (Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) dataset consisting of 4747 3D full face meshes. The classification accuracy obtained using expert manual categories was not very high, in the region of 72%-79%, indicating that the manual categories may be unreliable. In an attempt to improve these accuracies,an automatic categorisation method was applied. In general,the classification accuracies based on the automatic lip categories were higher than those obtained using the manual categories by at least 8% and the automatic categories were found to be statistically more significant in the lip area than the manual categories. The same approach was used to categorise the nose traits, the result indicating that the proposed categorisation approach was capable of categorising any face morphological trait without the ground truth about its traits categories. Additionally, to test the robustness of the proposed features, they were used in a popular problem of gender classification and analysis. The results demonstrated superior classification accuracy to that of comparable methods. Finally, a discovery phase of a genome wide association analysis(GWAS) was carried out for 11 automatic lip and nose traits categories. As a result, statistically significant associations were found between four traits and six single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). This is a very good result considering that for the 27 manual lip traits categories provided by medical expert, the associations were found between two traits and two SNPs only. This result testifies that the method proposed in this thesis for automatic categorisation of 3D facial morphology has a considerable potential for application to GWAS

Automatic classification of facial morphology for medical applications

Facial morphology measurement and classification play important role in the face anthropometry of many medical applications. This usually involves the investigation of medical abnormalities where specific facial features are studied by taking a number of measurements of the facial area under investigation. The measurements are often obtained from the three-dimensional (3D) scans of the faces; however, the measurements are often made manually, which is tedious and time consuming process. Moreover, in gene related studies thousands of measurements may be necessary in order to find statistically significant relationships between facial features and genes. Normative studies, from which typical populous models can be built, also require many measurements. Thus an automatic method to extract morphological measurements and interpret them is desirable. In this article, an automatic method for classification of facial morphology on the basis of a number of geometric measurements obtained automatically from 3D facial scans is presented. Among different facial features the philtrum, which is the vertical groove extending from the nose to the upper lip and the lip area, plays an important role in defining the interaction between the genes and craniofacial anomalies such as, for example, cleft lip and palate. In this paper, geometric features are analysed for their suitability to classify philtrum into three classes previously proposed by medical experts. Moreover, further analysis is conducted to assess the best number of classes to model the underlying data distribution from the point of view of classification accuracy. The obtained classification results are compared with the ground truth manual labelling of 3D face meshes provided by a medical expert. The dataset used for this research is taken from ALSPAC dataset and consists of 1000 3D face meshes. The proposed method achieves classification accuracy of 97% for this data set using the Mean, Minimum and Maximum curvature features in combination

Biological landmark Vs quasi-landmarks for 3D face recognition and gender classification

Face recognition and gender classification are vital topics in the field of computer graphic and pattern recognition. We utilized ideas from two growing ideas in computer vision, which are biological landmarks and quasi-landmarks (dense mesh) to propose a novel approach to compare their performance in face recognition and gender classification. The experimental work is conducted on FRRGv2 dataset and acquired 98% and 94% face recognition accuracies using the quasi and biological landmarks respectively. The gender classification accuracies are 92% for quasi-landmarks and 90% for biological landmarks

Study of Planktonic Foraminifera within Shiranish Formation in Selected Wells From Middle and Southern Iraq

خلفية: تم الاعتماد على بعض انواع متحجرات الفورامنيفرا الطافية لتقدير عمر تكوين شيرانش حيث تم التعرف على (23) نوعا من الفورامنيفرا الطافية، والتي تنتمي إلى (8) اجناس تنتمي إلى عائلتي (Globotruncanidae and Heterohelecidae) ضمن خمسة آبار موزعة على منطقة الدراسة والتي تضمنت (R-698، Ru-479، Ga-198P، EB-103 ، EB-104). بينت الدراسة وجود ثلاثة انطقة حياتية وهي Gansserina gansseri zone, Globotruncana aegyptiaca zone, Globotruncanita stuartiformis zone. المواد وطريقة العمل: بعد جمع العينات وإحضارها إلى المختبر، تمت معالجة كل عينة على حدة، حيث تم طهي النموذج على درجة حرارة عالية لمدة ساعتين بعد إضافة المادة المشتتة (NaOH) إليها، وتم غسل العينات بمنخل حجم 63 مايكرون وتركه ليجف، بعدها تم غربلة العينات بواسطة منخل حجم 450 مايكرون لفصل الرواسب عن المتحجرات، ثم اجريت عملية التقاط انواع المتحجرات وعزل تلك الانواع في علب خاصة لاكمال عملية التشخيص تحت المجهر العاكس. النتائج: اعتمادا على تشخيص انواع الفورامنيفرا الطافية تم تقسيم التكوين إلى عدة انطقة حياتية. الاستنتاج: بناءً على النتائج التي تم الحصول عليها من الدراسة الحالية وجد أن عمر تكوين شيرانش في الآبار المدروسة يمتد من الجزء العلوي من الكامبانيان المتأخر- ماستريختيان الأوسط.Background: In this study, some taxa of planktonic foraminifera fossils were relied upon, to determine the biozones of the diagnosed genus and the ages based on those species and to compare those areas with the areas identified in previous studies to find out the differences between the northern and southern areas in Iraq. Twenty three species of planktonic foraminifera were identified, which belong to eight genus belonging to the families (Globotruncanidae and Heterohelecidae) within five wells distributed over the study area that included (R-698, Ru-479, Ga-198P, EB 103, EB 104). The study showed that there are three biozones: Gansserina gansseri zone, Globotruncana aegyptiaca zone, Globotruncanita stuartiformis zone. Materials and Methods: After collecting the samples and bringing them to the laboratory, each sample was treated separately, where the model was cooked at a high temperature for two hours after adding the dispersant substance (NaOH) to it, and then the samples was washed with a sieve with a size of 63 microns and left to dry, then the samples was sieved 450 micron to separate the sediments from the fossils, and then the process of picking up the foraminifera genus and isolating those fossils in special folders to make the diagnosis process under a reflecting microscope inside the Department of Earth Sciences / College of Science / University of Basrah. Results: Depending on the diagnosis of these groups of planktonic foraminifera were divided into several areas. Conclusion: Depending on the results obtained from the current study, It was found that the age of the Shiranish formation in the wells studied extends from the upper part of the Late Campanian - Middle Maastrichtian

Synthesis and Thermal Characterization of Copolymers Containing Amino Acids

Thee copolymers of amino acid were synthesized in two steps. First, the amino acids react with resorcinol to formation of azo monomers step. They led in a second condensation polymerization step to copolymeric materials. The structures of the copolymers were characterized by means of FT-IR and 1H-NMR spectroscopy. The thermal properties were investigated by TGA and DTG. Keywords: copolymers, amino acid, thermal properties, azo compoun

A 3D morphometric perspective for facial gender analysis and classification using geodesic path curvature features

The relationship between the shape and gender of a face, with particular application to automatic gender classification, has been the subject of significant research in recent years. Determining the gender of a face, especially when dealing with unseen examples, presents a major challenge. This is especially true for certain age groups, such as teenagers, due to their rapid development at this phase of life. This study proposes a new set of facial morphological descriptors, based on 3D geodesic path curvatures, and uses them for gender analysis. Their goal is to discern key facial areas related to gender, specifically suited to the task of gender classification. These new curvature-based features are extracted along the geodesic path between two biological landmarks located in key facial areas. Classification performance based on the new features is compared with that achieved using the Euclidean and geodesic distance measures traditionally used in gender analysis and classification. Five different experiments were conducted on a large teenage face database (4745 faces from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) to investigate and justify the use of the proposed curvature features. Our experiments show that the combination of the new features with geodesic distances provides a classification accuracy of 89%. They also show that nose-related traits provide the most discriminative facial feature for gender classification, with the most discriminative features lying along the 3D face profile curve

An automatic approach for classification and categorisation of lip morphological traits

Classification of facial traits (e.g., lip shape) is an important area of medical research, for example, in determining associations between lip traits and genetic variants which may lead to a cleft lip. In clinical situations, classification of facial traits is usually performed subjectively directly on the individual or recorded later from a three-dimensional image, which is time consuming and prone to operator errors. The present study proposes, for the first time, an automatic approach for the classification and categorisation of lip area traits. Our approach uses novel three-dimensional geometric features based on surface curvatures measured along geodesic paths between anthropometric landmarks. Different combinations of geodesic features are analysed and compared. The effect of automatically identified categories on the face is visualised using a partial least squares method. The method was applied to the classification and categorisation of six lip shape traits (philtrum, Cupid’s bow, lip contours, lip-chin, and lower lip tone) in a large sample of 4747 faces of normal British Western European descents. The proposed method demonstrates correct automatic classification rate of up to 90%

The effect of maternal smoking and alcohol consumption on lip morphology

Objective: To determine whether maternal smoking and/or alcohol consumption has an influence on lip morphology. Maternal smoking is a known risk factor for orofacial clefts; however, its influence on normal lip variation is unknown. Recent research regarding normal lip morphology has been contradictory. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting and participants: A total of 4747 children from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) who each had 3D facial scans carried out at 15 years of age were included in the study. Methods: Each of the participants was automatically categorised regarding predetermined lip morphological traits. Questionnaires completed by their mothers identified smoking and alcohol habits during pregnancy. Logistic regression analyses were applied to determine the effect of maternal smoking and alcohol consumption on lip morphology. Results: Maternal smoking has significant effects on upper and lower lip contours, Cupid’s bow, lower lip-chin shape and lower lip tone (all P 6 units of alcohol are consumed per week (P = 0.0149, 32 weeks). Overall results suggest a deeply grooved philtrum is more likely if alcohol is consumed. Investigating the combined effect of smoking and alcohol consumption, lower lip contour (P = 0.00923) and lower lip-chin shape (P = 0.0171) are statistically significant, with lower lip contour more likely to be narrow in the midline, and lower lip-chin shape more likely to be an angular concavity. Conclusion: Maternal smoking influences a number of lip traits, including a possible epigenetic effect on upper lip contour. Maternal alcohol consumption, particularly at a high level, influences philtrum shape. Maternal smoking and alcohol consumption have a combined effect on lower lip contour and lower lip-chin shape

Applying an automated method of classifying lip morphological traits

Objective: To apply an automated computerised method to categorise and determine the prevalence of different types of lip traits, and to explore associations between lip traits and sex differences. Design: Observational descriptive study utilising an automated method of facial assessment. Setting and participants: A total of 4747 children from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) who each had 3D facial scans carried out at 15 years of age. Methods: Each of the participants was automatically categorised regarding predetermined lip morphological traits. Descriptive statistics were applied to report the prevalence of the different types of each trait, and chi-square tests were used to investigate sex differences and associations between traits. Results: A total of 4730 individuals were assessed (47% male, 53% female). Eight predetermined lip traits have been reported previously. There were differences in prevalence for all lip traits in male and female patients (all P ⩽ 0.0002), with differences between the sexes described for each trait. For example, a deeply grooved philtrum of average width was more prevalent in boys, and an indentation near the upper vermilion border was more prevalent in girls. Each of the traits was significantly associated with the other traits (all P < 0.0001), with particularly strong associations seen between traits in the same region (e.g. upper lip). Individual associations between traits are reported; for example, a straight lip contour was found to be associated with no true vermilion border in both the upper and lower lip regions. Conclusion: The automated computerised method described is an invaluable tool for the categorisation of lip morphological traits. The prevalence of various types of traits has been described. Sexual dimorphism exists for all the lip traits assessed. Generally, each of the traits are associated with all other traits, with individual associations reported