Research Into Assessment Of Facial Paralysis Based On Key Points And Regions

Facial paralysis is a common problem that involves the paralysis of any structures innervated by the facial nerve. The pathway of the facial nerve is long and relatively convoluted, and so there are a number of causes that may result in facial nerve paralysis. This disease has two types, it can be on one side or both of human's face and one side is much more common. When we talk about facial paralysis we usually mean one side. It is commonly thought that the facial paralysis is the total loss of voluntary muscle movement of one side of the face. The method this paper proposes can be applied to facial paralysis of one side of the face. This disease can make patients feel humiliating and bring psychological and functional impairment to them. This disease is seriously deteriorating patients'normal life. It causes a drooping mouth, drooling, and excessive tearing from one eye. It affects patients'expressions, affects their communications with others, keeps their eyes off protection of eyelids, and makes their faces not symmetrical. There are many people who suffer from facial paralysis, so an effective treatment is urgently needed. Evaluating the degree of one side facial paralysis caused by function disorder problems of facial nerves, and making a precise assessment of patients'paralysis and health status are meaningful to help the physicians to choose the most appropriate reconstructive scheme for patients'recovery from this disease. Our aim is to develop such a method and a system.In this thesis, we describe a new approach which is based on key points and region separation for quantitatively estimating the degree of facial paralysis. We first determine key points based on salient point detection. Then the differences between the two facial sides are calculated. The region separation is combined to help evaluate the degree of facial paralysis. We collect five images of every patient: raise eyes, raise eyebrows, raise nose, plump cheeks and open mouse. Fourteen key points of facial features are found and a score regarding to their asymmetry is calculated. Then we separate the whole face region, calculate the differences between them and obtain another score. The final score is obtained regarding to the two scores above. It reflects the degree of facial paralysis and patient's health status. The proposed method is proved to be useful and effective in practice at a certain extent.