A mobile robotic approach to autonomous surface scanning in legal medicine

TL;DR

A mobile robot can autonomously scan body surfaces in legal medicine, improving efficiency and reducing manual work.

Contribution

A mobile robotic system for autonomous RGB-D surface scanning in legal medicine is developed and validated.

Findings

Three robot positions achieve 94.96% coverage of body surfaces.

The system captures body geometry with 96.90% and 92.45% coverage for phantoms and corpses.

The system complements post-mortem CT scans for efficient documentation.

Abstract

Comprehensive legal medicine documentation includes internal and external examination of the corpse. Typically, this documentation is conducted manually during conventional autopsy. Systematic digital documentation would be desirable, especially for external wound examination, which is becoming more relevant for legal medicine analysis. For this purpose, RGB surface scanning has been introduced. While manual full-surface scanning using a handheld camera is time-consuming and operator-dependent, floor or ceiling-mounted robotic systems require specialized rooms. Hence, we consider whether a mobile robotic system can be used for external documentation.

We develop a mobile robotic system that enables full-body RGB-D surface scanning. Our work includes a detailed configuration space analysis to identify the environmental parameters that must be considered for a successful surface scan. We validate our findings through an experimental study in the lab and demonstrate the systems application in legal medicine.

Our configuration space analysis shows that a good trade-off between coverage and time is reached with three robot base positions, leading to a coverage of 94.96 %. Experiments validate the effectiveness of the system in accurately capturing body surface geometry with an average surface coverage of \documentclass[12pt]{minimal}
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\begin{document}$${96.90 \pm 3.16}$$\end{document}96.90±3.16 % and \documentclass[12pt]{minimal}
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\begin{document}$${92.45 \pm 1.43}$$\end{document}92.45±1.43 % for a body phantom and actual corpses, respectively.

This work demonstrates the potential of a mobile robotic system to automate RGB-D surface scanning in legal medicine, complementing post-mortem CT scans for inner documentation. Our results indicate that the proposed system can contribute to more efficient, autonomous legal medicine documentation, reducing the need for manual intervention.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11548-025-03507-w.

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