Hi-tech bid to give kids their lives back
Technologically advanced photos help surgeons to perfect their techniques in life-changing surgery for cleft-palate sufferers
DR Liberty Vittert watched as a sad little boy came into the hospital in India with his parents.
The four-year-old had a serious facial deformity and didn’t want to look at the camera to have a special 3D picture taken of his face.
But after having surgery to correct the problem, when he came back for a follow-up photo he was not only physically transformed but he came back smiling.
Liberty said: “The little kid showed up looking like the proudest little guy on the planet. He just sat on the chair and looked straight at the camera totally happy to have his picture taken.”
The statistics lecturer at Glasgow University had travelled to the Smyan Hospital in India with the Smile Train charity to teach medics how to use the specialist equipment she’d helped develop in Scotland.
It’s part of a pilot project that’s set to revolutionise the standard of surgery on children with cleft lip and palate in developing countries. Liberty and Professor Adrian Bowman, head of the school of mathematics and statistics at Glasgow University, have developed a 3D-mapping system that measures facial symmetry to within 1000th of a millimetre.
Every year, more than 170,000 children are born with a cleft deformity in developing countries and the technology will be used to help train doctors there in the corrective surgery.
A 3D post-surgery photograph is taken of the patient and a mapping algorithm measures facial symmetry, allowing the success of surgery to be objectively assessed and flagging up cases where the surgeon could benefit from more training.
Seeing first-hand how one boy’s life was transformed by the surgery
made Liberty all the more determined to make sure others have the best possible outcome. “It was such a drastic change from the scared parents and sad little kid from before. You know that happens but you don’t think it through until you see it. It changes these people’s lives. It gives them lives,” said Liberty. And she’s using maths to help improve the surgery. When Liberty was an undergraduate in Boston, she spent a summer working with a cranial facial surgeon. She saw every aspect of the plastic surgeon’s work – and she realised that plastic surgeons would make very subjective decisions on what changes they were going to make. “It got me thinking, ‘I wonder if there’s an objective way you could map a face’.” She researched statisticians who worked on 3D objects and says the person doing the most interesting work was Bowman. So seven years ago she moved to the university to work towards a PhD with him. “We’ve always been interested in how you can map the human face. That was the original aim of this project started seven years ago,” Liberty said. “But our question was who to implement it with? There are enormous commercial applications and tons of charities who work with facial deformity and surgery.” But the academics decided they wanted to work with Smile Train because they send doctors to developing countries to train local medics in how to carry out cleft lip and palate surgeries. As part of the pilot project, Liberty travelled to one of the poorest parts of India for two weeks. She said: “I’d