A Method Of Objective Assessment And Selecting Acupoints For Acupuncture Treatment Of Facial Paralysis Using Infrared Thermography

Facial paralysis is one of the common diseases that caused by the damage of facialnerve, the main symptoms are muscle spasm of eyes and mouth. At present, there is noidentified etiology of this disease, thus some patients with facial paralysis who failed to becured completely suffer movement faction maladjustment of facial muscles and frustrationof interpersonal communication in their daily life. But in the early stage, the majority ofpatients can be cured and the incidence of sequels can be dropped considerably byobjective disease assessment and appropriate selecting acupoints in acupuncture treatment.Therefore, both severity assessment of facial paralysis and reasonable selecting acupointshad great significance to families and society.The facial temperature distribution feature is one of the newly discovered symptomsof facial paralysis patients, and it can be visual displayed and recorded using Infraredthermography. In this paper, a new approach of objective assessment and selectingacupoints for acupuncture treatment of facial paralysis using infrared thermography isproposed based on the facial temperature distribution features. The main work of thisresearch are as follows:At first, we proposed a automatic location algorithm for localizing facial acupoints ininfrared thermal imaging based on facial temperature distribution features. In the process,the facial acupoints are localized mainly by a fusion of three physiological characteristicswhich are the facial temperature distribution specificity, edge and the facial organsdistribution pattern. The experiments indicated that the algorithm has a fast operationspeed, strong anti-interference ability, and the high accuracy rate of the acupointslocalization. This algorithm laid a foundation for objective selecting acupoints foracupuncture treatment.In subsequential, two new methods are proposed for representing the facialtemperature distribution features based on the statistical characteristics of the facialtemperature distribution.1) the asymmetry degree of facial temperature distribution,which is the histogram distance of bilateral local binary pattern (local binary pattern, LBP) in the facial infrared thermography.2) effective thermal area ratio, which is a product oftwo variables. The first variable is mean temperature difference between the specific facialregion and its contralateral region. The second variable is a ratio, which is equal to thearea of the abnormal region divided by the total area. The new representation, include notonly the image statistics, but also show the contralateral asymmetry in facial temperaturedistribution of facial paralysis. With these two features, combined BP neural network andformal concept analysis, we proposed the quantitative and qualitative methods forobjective assessment of facial paralysis severity. Experiments show that the facialtemperature distribution asymmetry feature significant positively correlates with theseverity of facial paralysis. In addition, the classification accuracy of face paralysisseverity using the method is full compliance with the clinical application standard.Therefore, the use of infrared thermal imaging to extract the facial temperaturedistribution asymmetry features is a powerful tool for an objective assessment of facialnerve function.At last, we proposed a new clinical method of selecting acupoints for acupuncturetreatment of facial paralysis using infrared thermal imaging to select five facial acupointswhich have the maximum temperature differences between the right and left sides in allfacial acupoints. Clinical random grouping trials show that the course of treatment wasshorter in the test group using infrared thermography than those in the control grouptreated with acupuncture at conventionally selected acupoints, the clinical efficacy of thetest group was increased by18.27%, which show statistical significance. Hence, thethermogram-aided acupoint selection method not only applied in acupuncture therapy offacial paralysis, but also be extended to the acupuncture therapy of other facial diseases，which is beneficial to objectivity and modernization of acupoint selection for acupunctureand moxibustion treatments.