Measuring Bilateral Symmetry in Three Dimensional Magnetic Resonance Images

An important example of bilateral symmetry in nature is the approximate bilateral symmetry exhibited by humans. Detecting and measuring bilateral symmetry in medical images should provide beneets in a clinical environment | particularly in the area of cranio-facial re-constructive surgery. Just as artisans have created bilaterally symmetric cultural artefacts for thousands of years, modern surgeons attempt to reconstruct malformed cranio-facial features so that they are approximately bilaterally symmetric | approximate bilateral symmetry is an important concept in the human notion of`beauty'. This paper presents a method for detecting the dominant plane of bilateral symmetry in a three dimensional (3D) image and subsequently measuring the degree of bilateral symmetry in the image. The approach is similar to other work in the eld, however this paper provides a unique perspective to the problem by using a simple representation of the data and a more sensitive measure of symmetry. Although this paper promotes the use of 3D magnetic resonance images, the technique is also applicable to other datasets.