Description of Breast Morphology Through Bag of Normals Representation

In this work we focus on digital shape analysis of breast models to assist breast surgeon for medical and surgical purposes. A clinical procedure for female breast digital scan is proposed. After a manual ROI definition through cropping, the meshes are automatically processed. The breasts are represented exploiting “bag of normals” representation, resulting in a 64-d descriptor. PCA is computed and the obtained first 2 principal components are used to plot the breasts shape into a 2D space. We show how the breasts subject to a surgery change their representation in this space and provide a cue about the error in this estimation. We believe that the proposed procedure represents a valid solution to evaluate the results of surgeries, since one of the most important goal of the specialists is to symmetrically reconstruct breasts and an objective tool to measure the result is currently missing.