Nonrigid reconstruction of 3D breast surfaces with a low-cost RGBD camera for surgical planning and aesthetic evaluation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-cost, nonrigid 3D breast surface reconstruction method using a consumer RGBD camera, improving accuracy for surgical planning and aesthetic evaluation by mitigating motion artifacts.

Contribution

It presents a novel nonrigid registration approach with ICP for consumer-grade RGBD data, achieving higher accuracy in breast surface modeling compared to existing methods.

Findings

Better geometric accuracy in clinical cases

Lower landmark error scores

More accurate breast volume estimates

Abstract

Accounting for 26% of all new cancer cases worldwide, breast cancer remains the most common form of cancer in women. Although early breast cancer has a favourable long-term prognosis, roughly a third of patients suffer from a suboptimal aesthetic outcome despite breast conserving cancer treatment. Clinical-quality 3D modelling of the breast surface therefore assumes an increasingly important role in advancing treatment planning, prediction and evaluation of breast cosmesis. Yet, existing 3D torso scanners are expensive and either infrastructure-heavy or subject to motion artefacts. In this paper we employ a single consumer-grade RGBD camera with an ICP-based registration approach to jointly align all points from a sequence of depth images non-rigidly. Subtle body deformation due to postural sway and respiration is successfully mitigated leading to a higher geometric accuracy through regularised locally affine transformations. We present results from 6 clinical cases where our method compares well with the gold standard and outperforms a previous approach. We show that our method produces better reconstructions qualitatively by visual assessment and quantitatively by consistently obtaining lower landmark error scores and yielding more accurate breast volume estimates.