Computer Aided Diagnosis of Bone Lesions in the Facial Skeleton

We present a system for computer aided diagnosis of bone tumors in the facial skeleton. There are many different lesions with ra­diographic manifestation in the jaws. Our system helps performing the differential diagnosis of these. The input is a digitized orthopantomograph (OPG) in which the user marks the position of the lesion with a single mouse click. An active contour model then automatically finds the boundaries of the lesion. Gray­level histograms, MRSAR texture featu­res and Gabor filter features are computed for the lesion region. These features are then combined and used to query a database containing expert-diagnosed reference cases. The result is a number of similar cases, with tumor position marked and with available expert annotations. We show good agreement between our results and differential diagnosis given by humans. The system is also a suitable tool for training and education.