12 Labours Seminar Series (Platform 3): Measuring the geometry of the human body surface

Understanding the arrangement of bone, muscle, and fat tissue in the human body is essential for the diagnosis of diseases and the development of personalised digital twins. While imaging modalities, such as CT and MRI give accurate measurements inside the body, these modalities require bulky and expensive equipment, expert operators, and time-consuming procedures. Optical scanning of the body is a modality that is becoming cheaper and of higher spatial resolution, however it is limited to capturing the anatomy of the skin surface only. By combining optical scanning techniques with statistical models of the human anatomy, based on large datasets of internal body scans, it may be possible to perform rapid and cheap scanning of individuals to estimate their internal anatomy.

This talk will present the development of a custom optical 3D scanner, that consists of an array of inward-looking high-resolution cameras surrounding a human participant, and the subsequent use of statistical shape models for the skin surface and bone anatomy estimates.