Fig. 1.

Stages of processing in the landmark-free approach. Step 1, extraction of region of interest. Initial thresholding of µCT image was used to make a binary mask and regions of the mask were separated by bone density using secondary thresholding, with some manual clean-up based on known anatomy. A region of interest (in this example the mandible in red) was chosen for further analysis. Step 2, mesh generated and decimated by a factor of 0.0125 to reduce data file size. Step 3, meshes of all subjects aligned either using rigid body alignment with no scaling or similarity alignment with scaling. Step 4, atlas construction (arrows represent momenta). Step 5, statistical analysis and visualisation of shape data.