Result: FACIAL NERVE STREAM TRAJECTORY DATA MODELLING AND VISUALIZATION

Bell's palsy is the paralysis of facial muscles caused by perturbations affecting the facial nerve. It is the origin of a physical suffering, and has an emotional and psychological impact on patients. Treatments of Bell's palsy are still not well-defined, nevertheless physical therapies techniques, such as facial exercise, biofeedback, laser, electrotherapy, massage and thermotherapy, are used to speed up the recovery. The main disadvantage of used techniques is the absence of a clear and concise modelling of manipulated data resulting from treatments performed on various patients by a range of physicians. This makes the exchange and the large-scale exploitation of these data difficult and complex. The objective of this work is to supervise the states evolution of patients affected by facial paralysis leading to recovery. Modelling facial nerve stream trajectory data seems to be an essential step leading to perform our purpose. In fact, it permits representation unification and facilitates data querying in order to ensure recovery surveillance and the disease understanding. Moreover a visualization algorithm is proposed to track facial nerve stream in order to observe recovery progress and to identify the occurrence of conduction problem preventing it.