3D Surface-to-Structure Translation using Deep Convolutional Networks
This addresses a medical imaging problem for healthcare by enabling non-invasive disease prediction from surface scans, though it is an incremental step as it builds on existing datasets and methods.
The paper tackles the problem of estimating internal body structures from 3D surface models using deep convolutional neural networks trained on CT images, with a prototype developed using Visible Human Project datasets.
Our demonstration shows a system that estimates internal body structures from 3D surface models using deep convolutional neural networks trained on CT (computed tomography) images of the human body. To take pictures of structures inside the body, we need to use a CT scanner or an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner. However, assuming that the mutual information between outer shape of the body and its inner structure is not zero, we can obtain an approximate internal structure from a 3D surface model based on MRI and CT image database. This suggests that we could know where and what kind of disease a person is likely to have in his/her body simply by 3D scanning surface of the body. As a first prototype, we developed a system for estimating internal body structures from surface models based on Visible Human Project DICOM CT Datasets from the University of Iowa Magnetic Resonance Research Facility.