Medical applications

The wide variety of uses of measurements from imagery to provide spatial information for medicine and human sciences is categorized into three distinct groups. The first category of applications involves surface shape measurement of any part of the body, whether very small or large. It is now commonly undertaken by laser scanning and structured light measurement, and finds uses in plastic surgery, reconstructive medicine, orthopaedics, prosthetics orthodontics and other dentistry, dermatology and cosmetics. The second group involves the recording of the human body in motion, which is widely used predominantly but not solely for studies of walking people. The third group represents the most novel application: the surgical use of realtime measurement to precisely position surgical instruments and prostheses in the operating theatre. The latter two fields are distinguished from the first by being well suited to conventional photogrammetric triangulation using camera imagery in conjunction with the matching of features in the images. This chapter identifies the main challenges in these three groups, specifies the technical features which characterize each, and records some of the applications for purposes involving human beings