Israeli imaging tool takes surprises out of plastic surgery

IMFA:

It must be true that two heads are better than one: Identical twin scientists in Israel have pioneered novel software that will give plastic surgery candidates an anatomically accurate "after" picture in three dimensions.

Once commercialized through a company they're forming with their former PhD adviser, the imaging software will be a vast improvement over the standard 2D before-and-after images of past procedures. When patients base their expectations on snapshots of others, they often don't get a realistic understanding of how they would appear after undergoing a similar operation.

This new tool for plastic surgeons was invented at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology by a team working with Dr. Alex Bronstein, now a senior lecturer in the Tel Aviv University department of electrical engineering, and his brother, Dr. Michael Bronstein of the Technion department of computer science.

The system was formulated using real clinical data and complex computer modeling. Keying in data from past plastic surgery patients and accounting for variables such as the patients' ages and different tissue types, the program retrieves and displays geometric objects in the same manner that Google retrieves and displays web pages.

A virtual mirror

Alex Bronstein calls the invention a "virtual mirror". "It gives surgeons and their patients a way to see a 3D before-and-after image as though the patient has really undergone the operation," says Bronstein, who joined the TAU faculty in October and is setting up a new lab for 3D imaging and geometric computing there.

Though current photographic equipment can "see" and represent the human body from only one angle, the Bronsteins and their colleagues devised an algorithm capable of generating a 3D image from a 2D picture.

The brothers, who immigrated from Russia to Israel in 1991, worked on the project primarily with lab engineer Yaron Honen, under the direction of Dr. Ron Kimmel. Kimmel and the Bronstein brothers wrote several related research papers, most recently for the journals ACM Transactions on Graphics and SIAM. They predict that the new system could also be used to help weight-loss programs show clients what they could look like after successfully shedding pounds.

Which is which?

Back in 2003, when Kimmel was the brothers' academic and PhD supervisor in the Technion's Program of Excellence, he had taught them a course called "Numerical Geometry of Images." Recognizing twin brilliance when he saw it, Kimmel had flippantly challenged these two graduate students to come up with a 3D face recognition method good enough to tell identical twins apart.

The brothers, then 22 years old, took the challenge seriously and created a successful face identification system that compares the geometrical variables of the human face - which is constantly in motion - as flexible surfaces. The results of this groundbreaking research in face recognition, reported on by media across the world, have led not only to the software for plastic surgeons, but also to many other potentially major applications such as advanced airport and banking security technology - and, most recently, stopping the practice of video pirating.

In February, the Bronsteins and Kimmel announced that they'd invented a fingerprint-like coding program, called DNA analogue, that could be applied to original video files. To find out if a copy of the file is a pirated version, it would simply require checking whether its "fingerprint" had been altered. "We have a few commercial customers trying the technology in beta testing," says Alex Bronstein.