Pre-surgical device for correction of the cleft lip

The first object of this thesis is to propose a new architecture that can be utilized in the pre-surgical treatment of cleft lip and palate. The architecture consists of two main parts mechanical and electronic. The proposed architecture provides an external pressure applied directly to the cleft lip areas through an airbag placed on the mechanical part of the architecture. The amount of pressure applied to the cleft lip is controlled by the electronic part. FEA method was used to analyze the effect of pressure applied to the cleft lip and cleft bone regions. We analyzed the effect of displacement distributions, the tensile and compressive strengths, and von Mises stress distributions on the cleft areas. The results proved that the external pressure led to bringing the incisions closer to each other. External pressure has contributed to bringing the incisions closer to the target position of the plastic surgeons. The results have shown that the proposed architecture can contribute to the presurgical treatment of clefts in the mouth and palate as an alternative to the traditional method. The second object of our thesis is to detect the cleft lip and extract its features that provide a second opinion for plastic surgeons for a vision of the cleft lip features using the combined method. The combined method consists of three algorithms for cleft lip detection and feature extraction (face detection, cleft lip classification, and cleft lip detection). The results show that our method has the best efficiency and high accuracy in lip detection and optimal feature extraction. Moreover, the proposed method demonstrates its effectiveness with a limited set of cleft lip images.