English

AutoFFS: Adversarial Deformations for Facial Feminization Surgery Planning

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-04 v1 Image and Video Processing

Abstract

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 and a human perceptual study, confirming that the generated morphologies exhibit target sex characteristics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.02288,
  title  = {AutoFFS: Adversarial Deformations for Facial Feminization Surgery Planning},
  author = {Paul Friedrich and Florentin Bieder and Florian M. Thieringer and Philippe C. Cattin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.02288},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Code: https://github.com/pfriedri/autoffs