ANALYSIS OF A CURVED LINE BY FOURIER PROGRESSION

ITS APPLICATION TO MORPHOLOGY OF THE MANDIBULAR FOSSA

Abstract

Some investigations have been made on the morphology of the mandibular fossa from radiological as well as anatomical viewpoints, but suffered from the lack of appropriate means of analysis.In the course of radiological study of the growth of the mandibular fossa, we therefore attempted to express the shape of the fossa as revealed by lateral radiograph as a single function using Fourier Progression.
It turned out that this method had sufficient reproducibility;i.e., the function derived was capable of reproducing a curve indistinguishable from the original one in the radiograph.Since such functions are convenient for mathematical analysis, this method will find a wide use in radiology.