3D Facial Morphological Analysis for Genetic Association Studies: A Preliminary Study

The genetic association of human facial morphological variation recently becomes a more and more active research field, which aims to quantitatively analyze the possible relation measure between the gene base and a kind of facial morphological variations. In this paper, we propose a general framework for analyzing facial morphology variation using scanned 3D landmarks, and explores the phenotype features of facial morphology for identifying population root of Japanese archipelago. The proposed framework mainly includes two steps: (1) registration and landmark correspondence, (2) statistical analysis of 3D facial morphological variation and population classification using facial morphological features. Both principal component analysis (PCA) and Mean Hyperplane are used for exploring the facial morphological variations. Experiments show that our proposed strategy can give promising identification performances between the Mainland Japanese and the Ryukyuan. Keywords—Facial morphology, Gene, Statistical learning, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Mean hyperplane, Registration, Landmark correspandence