TRACE: Artifact-Robust Statistical Shape Modeling from Imperfect Surface Scans - A Case Study in Craniosynostosis 3D Photography

2026-08-22

AI Summary

该研究提出TRACE框架，通过处理含噪声的3D头像照片直接构建统计形状模型，以解决颅缝早闭分析中形态量化问题。

Abstract

Craniosynostosis severity analysis increasingly relies on statistical shape models (SSMs) to quantify cranial morphology, but most existing workflows depend on computed tomography or heavily curated three-dimensional (3D) photographs. Raw clinical 3D photographs provide a radiation-free and repeatable alternative, yet often contain shoulders, hands, hair, clothing, scanner noise, and incomplete boundaries that corrupt correspondences. We introduce the Template-constrained Robust Artifact-aware Correspondence Estimation (TRACE) framework, an unsupervised method for constructing SSMs directly from artifact-contaminated clinical 3D head photographs. TRACE predicts sparse anatomically corresponding head-surface control points from the raw point cloud, refines them through a coarse-to-fine Surface-Aware Deformation cascade, and uses thin-plate spline warping to deform a clean template mesh into a subject-specific head reconstruction. This template-constrained formulation keeps dense correspondences on clinically relevant head anatomy while suppressing non-head artifacts. The correspondence module is decoupled from the point-cloud encoder, enabling the same deformation pipeline to be paired with different backbones, including PointNet, DGCNN, and Point Transformer V3. Across all backbones, TRACE substantially improves surface sampling, topology preservation, and shape-model quality over prior SSM methods, providing a scalable foundation for photograph-based craniosynostosis shape analysis and a framework that may extend to other artifact-contaminated surface scans when an appropriate clean template is available.

Problem

• statistical shape models
• artifact-contaminated
• clinical 3D photographs
• craniosynostosis

Innovation

• Template-constrained Robust Artifact-aware Correspondence Estimation (TRACE)
• Surface-Aware Deformation
• thin-plate spline warping
• unsupervised method