With the mushrooming use of computed tomography (CT) images in clinical decision making, management of CT data becomes increasingly difficult. From the patient identification perspective, using the standard DICOM tag to track patient information is challenged by issues such as misspelling, lost file, site variation, etc. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of leveraging the faces in 3D CT images as biometric features. Specifically, we propose an automatic processing pipeline that first detects facial landmarks in 3D for ROI extraction and then generates aligned 2D depth images, which are used for automatic recognition. To boost the recognition performance, we employ transfer learning to reduce the data sparsity issue and to introduce a group sampling strategy to increase inter-class discrimination when training the recognition network. Our proposed method is capable of capturing underlying identity characteristics in medical images while reducing memory consumption. To test its effectiveness, we curate 600 3D CT images of 280 patients from multiple sources for performance evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a 1:56 identification accuracy of 92.53% and a 1:1 verification accuracy of 96.12%, outperforming other competing approaches.
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