Abstract
Epilepsy is a frequent chronic and genetic brain disease. In diagnose of genetic and craniofacial disease, the face is one of the gold standard phenotypic features. This study was carried out to determine the angle and linear measurements of face region in Turkish healthy and epilepsy subjects, and to apply a feature selection method to identify the most important attributes that affect epilepsy decision. The retrospective and observational study was conducted with 120 subjects with epilepsy aged between 18 to 60 years (56 males; 64 females) and 60 healthy subjects aged between 18 and 55 years (29 males, 31 females). Pyramidal angle performed from 3 reference points, nasal bone length, the width of piriform aperture, nasofrontal angle, nasolabial angle, distance between glabella and nasion were measured on computed tomography. Also, we used supervised machine learning to learn classification models to detect epilepsy as our dataset has class label where 1 means epilepsy, 2 means healthy. The well-known classification model learning algorithms implemented in Weka (with version 3.8.6) machine learning toolkit were applied. All parameters excluding nasal bone length were higher in epilepsy patients than in healthy subjects. Also, there was a significant difference in nasal pyramidal angle nasal bone, nasal pyramidal angle nasal tip, piriform aperture, and nasal bone lengths between epilepsy and healthy subjects. However, age related changes for healthy subjects were no seen in healthy subjects. In epilepsy subjects there was a significant difference in 6 measurements all nasal pyramidal angles, piriform aperture width, nasofrontal angle, and nasolabial angle. Gender related changes were found in only nasal pyramidal angle nasal root and nasal bone of healthy subjects, in nasal pyramidal angle nasal bone, nasal bone length, nasofrontal angle of epilepsy subjects. We can say epilepsy may affect the some facial parameters and these, although anthropometric measurements are affected by age and gender parameters. Comprehensive knowledge of this region's normal references ranges is essential for planning, proper selection of silicone implants or osteotomy determining the limitations of the surgical field and minimizing the risk of complication and performing aesthetic facial surgery or rhinoplasty in epilepsy patients.