Modelling Facial Tissue Layers for Precision Skull Overlay and Reconstruction

Abstract

Facial reconstruction from skeletal remains is a broad area of research that has great utility in forensic science, anthropology, and clinical uses. Reconstructing an individual's face from their underlying bone structure can be important in identifying unknown individuals, studying disjunctions in human evolution, and planning surgical practice. By identifying the skull's morphologic patterns to reconstruct a likely representation of the soft tissues of the skin and muscle that characterise facial structure compared with standard manual facial reconstruction the proposed workflow allows for a fast, consistent, and scalable approach. This research aims to resolve the issues associated with linking skeletal data to facial identity and has myriad applications ranging from forensic casework, through academia and clinical cases. This technological advancement represents a significant advancement in the development of data-use tools for human anatomy and creates a unique opportunity in the facial approximation domain.