Automatic Neurocranial Landmarks Detection from Visible Facial Landmarks Leveraging 3D Head Priors

The localization and tracking of neurocranial landmarks is essential in modern medical procedures, e.g., transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). However, state-of-the-art treatments still rely on the manual identification of head targets and require setting retroreflective markers for tracking. This limits the applicability and scalability of TMS approaches, making them time-consuming, dependent on expensive hardware, and prone to errors when retroreflective markers drift from their initial position. To overcome these limitations, we propose a scalable method capable of inferring the position of points of interest on the scalp, e.g., the International 10–20 System’s neurocranial landmarks. In contrast with existing approaches, our method does not require human intervention or markers; head landmarks are estimated leveraging visible facial landmarks, optional head size measurements, and statistical head model priors. We validate the proposed approach on ground truth data from 1,150 subjects, for which facial 3D and head information is available; our technique achieves a localization RMSE of 2.56 mm on average, which is of the same order as reported by high-end techniques in TMS. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/odedsc/ANLD.