Mimetic Muscle Rehabilitation Analysis Using Clustering of Low Dimensional 3D Kinect Data

TL;DR

This study proposes an unsupervised clustering method using low-dimensional 3D Kinect data to objectively monitor facial muscle rehabilitation progress in patients with facial paralysis, reducing clinician workload and improving assessment accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel clustering-based approach utilizing functional data analysis of Kinect data to assess facial paralysis recovery objectively, surpassing subjective scales like HB.

Findings

Effective differentiation between severe and mild paralysis cases.

Comparison of clustering algorithms shows improved accuracy with functional data.

Challenges remain in distinguishing adjacent paralysis levels.

Abstract

Facial nerve paresis is a severe complication that arises post-head and neck surgery; This results in articulation problems, facial asymmetry, and severe problems in non-verbal communication. To overcome the side effects of post-surgery facial paralysis, rehabilitation requires which last for several weeks. This paper discusses an unsupervised approach to rehabilitating patients who have temporary facial paralysis due to damage in mimetic muscles. The work aims to make the rehabilitation process objective compared to the current subjective approach, such as House-Brackmann (HB) scale. Also, the approach will assist clinicians by reducing their workload in assessing the improvement during rehabilitation. This paper focuses on the clustering approach to monitor the rehabilitation process. We compare the results obtained from different clustering algorithms on various forms of the same data set, namely dynamic form, data expressed as functional data using B-spline basis expansion, and by finding the functional principal components of the functional data. The study contains data set of 85 distinct patients with 120 measurements obtained using a Kinect stereo-vision camera. The method distinguish effectively between patients with the least and greatest degree of facial paralysis, however patients with adjacent degrees of paralysis provide some challenges. In addition, we compared the cluster results to the HB scale outputs.