IEEE ACCESS, vol.8, pp.200461-200476, 2020 (SCI-Expanded)
Robots and artificial intelligence technologies have become very important in the health applications as in many other fields. The proposed system in this work aims to provide detailed analysis of pre-op and post-op stage of FUE hair transplant procedures to enable surgeon to plan and assess success of the operations. In order to achieve this target, a robotic and vision-based system imaging and AI based analysis approach is developed. The proposed system performs analyses in three main stages: initialization, scanning, and analysis. At the initialization stage, 3D model of the patient's head generated at first by locating a depth camera in various positions around the patient by the help of a collaborative robot. At the second stage, where high resolution image capturing is performed in a loop with the usage of the 3D model, raw images are processed by a deep learning based object detection algorithm where follicles in pre-op and extracted follicle positions (i.e. holes) and placed grafts in post-op is detected. At the last stage, thickness of each hair is computed at the detected hair follicle positions using another deep learning-based segmentation approach. These data are combined to obtain objective evaluation criteria to generate patient report. Experimental results show that the developed system can be used successfully in hair transplantation operations.