# A comparative study of breast surface reconstruction for aesthetic outcome assessment

## TL;DR

This study compares low-cost and high-end 3D scanning technologies for breast surface reconstruction, demonstrating that affordable sensors can achieve clinically useful accuracy for aesthetic assessment.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of low-cost RGBD sensors against commercial scanners in breast 3D reconstruction, highlighting their potential clinical utility.

## Key findings

- Low-cost sensors achieve reconstruction errors within 3 mm.
- Reconstruction quality is affected by body deformation and skin texture.
- Affordable sensors can be effective for clinical aesthetic evaluation.

## Abstract

Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer type in women, and while its survival rate is generally high the aesthetic outcome is an increasingly important factor when evaluating different treatment alternatives. 3D scanning and reconstruction techniques offer a flexible tool for building detailed and accurate 3D breast models that can be used both pre-operatively for surgical planning and post-operatively for aesthetic evaluation. This paper aims at comparing the accuracy of low-cost 3D scanning technologies with the significantly more expensive state-of-the-art 3D commercial scanners in the context of breast 3D reconstruction. We present results from 28 synthetic and clinical RGBD sequences, including 12 unique patients and an anthropomorphic phantom demonstrating the applicability of low-cost RGBD sensors to real clinical cases. Body deformation and homogeneous skin texture pose challenges to the studied reconstruction systems. Although these should be addressed appropriately if higher model quality is warranted, we observe that low-cost sensors are able to obtain valuable reconstructions comparable to the state-of-the-art within an error margin of 3 mm.