Cortical Bone Width Measurement Based on Active Shape Models and Automatic Contrast Stretching on Dental Panoramic Radiograph

Information on the morphological changes of mandibular on dental panoramic image is needed to detect various diseases, especially osteoporosis. Measure automatically the width of cortical bone is one of the measurement problems due to uneven illumination and noise disturbance of the image.This paper proposes a new system that can automatically measure the width of cortical bone along the sampled mandibular bone images by using Active Shape Models (ASM) method. For image enhancement, we introduce an automatic contrast stretching algorithm by which cortical bone area seems clearly. Measurements were taken at the boundary between the results of fitting statistical models generated by the ASM method with the object in the image. Experimental results on several dental panoramic radiographs for measuring cortical bone on the left and right region shows the robustness of the proposed method. Keyword: Active Shape Models (ASM), automatic contrast stretching, Cortical Bone width measurement, dental panoramic.