The main objective of the facial edema evaluation is providing the needed information to determine the effectiveness of the Serving Tray Liners/Mats anti-inflammatory drugs in development.This paper presents a system that measures the four main variables present in facial edemas: trismus, blush (coloration), temperature, and inflammation.Measurements are obtained by using image processing and the combination of different devices such as a projector, a PC, a digital camera, a thermographic camera, and a cephalostat.
Data analysis and processing are performed using MATLAB.Facial inflammation is measured by comparing three-dimensional reconstructions of inflammatory variations using the fringe projection technique.Trismus is measured Vitamin D by converting pixels to centimeters in a digitally obtained image of an open mouth.
Blushing changes are measured by obtaining and comparing the RGB histograms from facial edema images at different times.Finally, temperature changes are measured using a thermographic camera.Some tests using controlled measurements of every variable are presented in this paper.
The results allow evaluating the measurement system before its use in a real test, using the pain model approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which consists in extracting the third molar to generate the facial edema.