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Main Authors: Friedrich, Paul, Bieder, Florentin, Thieringer, Florian M., Cattin, Philippe C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02288
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author Friedrich, Paul
Bieder, Florentin
Thieringer, Florian M.
Cattin, Philippe C.
author_facet Friedrich, Paul
Bieder, Florentin
Thieringer, Florian M.
Cattin, Philippe C.
contents Facial feminization surgery (FFS) is a key component of gender affirmation for transgender and gender diverse patients, aiming to reshape craniofacial structures toward a female morphology. Current surgical planning procedures largely rely on subjective clinical assessment, lacking quantitative and reproducible anatomical guidance. We therefore propose AutoFFS, a novel data-driven framework that generates counterfactual skull morphologies through adversarial free-form deformations. Our method performs a deformation-based targeted adversarial attack on an ensemble of pre-trained binary sex classifiers that learned sexual dimorphism, effectively transforming individual skull shapes toward the target sex. The generated counterfactual skull morphologies provide a quantitative foundation for preoperative planning in FFS, driving advances in this largely overlooked patient group. We validate our approach through classifier-based evaluation, propose Morphological Fréchet Distance (MFD) and Morphological Kernel Distance (MKD) to evaluate distributional alignment of generated and real populations, and perform a human perceptual study, confirming that the generated morphologies exhibit target sex characteristics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02288
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AutoFFS: Adversarial Deformations for Facial Feminization Surgery Planning
Friedrich, Paul
Bieder, Florentin
Thieringer, Florian M.
Cattin, Philippe C.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
Facial feminization surgery (FFS) is a key component of gender affirmation for transgender and gender diverse patients, aiming to reshape craniofacial structures toward a female morphology. Current surgical planning procedures largely rely on subjective clinical assessment, lacking quantitative and reproducible anatomical guidance. We therefore propose AutoFFS, a novel data-driven framework that generates counterfactual skull morphologies through adversarial free-form deformations. Our method performs a deformation-based targeted adversarial attack on an ensemble of pre-trained binary sex classifiers that learned sexual dimorphism, effectively transforming individual skull shapes toward the target sex. The generated counterfactual skull morphologies provide a quantitative foundation for preoperative planning in FFS, driving advances in this largely overlooked patient group. We validate our approach through classifier-based evaluation, propose Morphological Fréchet Distance (MFD) and Morphological Kernel Distance (MKD) to evaluate distributional alignment of generated and real populations, and perform a human perceptual study, confirming that the generated morphologies exhibit target sex characteristics.
title AutoFFS: Adversarial Deformations for Facial Feminization Surgery Planning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02288