An evaluation of active shape models for the automatic identification of cephalometric landmarks

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.