3D tissue reconstruction with Kinect to evaluate neck lymphedema
This provides a reliable measurement tool for medical professionals to assess therapy effectiveness for neck lymphedema patients, though it is incremental as it applies existing technology to a new medical application.
The researchers tackled the problem of insufficient evaluation of neck lymphedema therapy by developing a 3D computer vision method using a Kinect depth sensor to measure volumetric changes in soft neck tissues, enabling accurate comparison of patient models over time.
Lymphedema is a condition of localized tissue swelling caused by a damaged lymphatic system. Therapy to these tissues is applied manually. Some of the methods are lymph drainage, compression therapy or bandaging. However, the therapy methods are still insufficiently evaluated. Especially, because of not having a reliable method to measure the change of such a soft and flexible tissue. In this research, our goal has been providing a 3d computer vision based method to measure the changes of the neck tissues. To do so, we used Kinect as a depth sensor and built our algorithms for the point cloud data acquired from this sensor. The resulting 3D models of the patient necks are used for comparing the models in time and measuring the volumetric changes accurately. Our discussions with the medical doctors validate that, when used in practice this approach would be able to give better indication on which therapy method is helping and how the tissue is changing in time.