3D Temporal Analysis for Autism Spectrum Disorder Screening During Attention Tasks

Accurate Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) screening for school-age children is crucial to identify cases that may have been missed earlier and to enable timely interventions supporting social, cognitive, and academic development. Current ASD screening relies on subjective assessments and 2D analysis methods that fail to capture spatial displacement patterns characteristic of ASD behaviors. In this study, a novel 3D temporal analysis framework is presented, built on top of DECA (Detailed Expression Capture and Animation), a 3D modeling framework, to extract comprehensive head pose parameters (including translational components $T_x, T_y, T_z$) and facial expressions independent of pose variations. LSTM and GRU-based temporal classifiers were trained on the extracted 3D features from video data collected from 39 participants (19 ASD, 20 TD) aged 7-12 years during Virtual Reality-Continuous Performance Test tasks. The GRU-based models demonstrated superior performance, with 3D head pose features achieving 83.9\% accuracy and 3D facial features reaching 81.4\% accuracy, outperforming 2D baseline approaches by 10.7\% and 7.5\%, respectively. Furthermore, multimodal fusion of 3D head pose and facial features with PCA-based dimensionality reduction achieved the highest accuracy of 84.6\%, outperforming unimodal approaches. This work establishes a foundation for objective, automated screening tools addressing current diagnostic limitations in ASD identification for school-age populations.

Assessment of the quantitative impact of occlusal positioning splints on temporomandibular joint conditions

A computational method for quantitative analysis of temporomandibular joint (TMJ) configuration using occlusal positioning splints is proposed and demonstrated. The method models a positioning splint as a physical realization of a predefined rigid transformation of the mandible, derived from multimodal data, including CBCT, facial motion acquisition, and dental scans integrated within a common coordinate system. Splints corresponding to selected mandibular positions are designed and fabricated, and their positioning accuracy is evaluated using repeated scans of plaster models. Discrepancies are represented as error transformations and analyzed statistically in the space of rigid motions. The estimated transformations are propagated to segmented TMJ structures, enabling simulation-based evaluation of joint space changes. Transformation-based error analysis and surface distance metrics are used to quantify differences between planned and achieved configurations. The method enables indirect assessment of TMJ configuration using a single anatomical model and transformation data, reducing the need for repeated imaging across multiple mandibular positions. This study is intended as a methodological demonstration, supported by a clear step-by-step graphical presentation, and does not aim to provide clinical validation.