Creating a statistical atlas of the cranium

Normative data is very important for simulation procedures in craniofacial surgery [1]. While treating e.g. a malformed skull the surgeon seeks to reconstruct its natural and harmonic shape. Atlas or normative data of the skull could support the surgeon in this effort [2], as it would provide a standard model of the skull which gives an idea of the natural shape. We create a standard skull by averaging regularly formed skulls in a shape space spanned by spherical harmonics. While state-of-the-art methods use landmarks to define the shape and mean shapes [4,5,6,14], this method is deterministic, i.e. it manages averaging without landmarks and it provides a complete description of the shape. In addition the shape space can be used to classify shapes to identify different types of an anatomy.