Motion compensation in hand-held laser scanning for surface modeling in plastic and reconstructive surgery.

The purpose of this work is to develop a new integrated methodology for breast morphology assessment in plastic and reconstructive surgery. Such a methodology comprises hand-held laser scanning with active compensation of breathing motion and involuntary movements, in order to obtain a thorough and artifacts-free representation of patient breast shape. This was obtained by tracking surface motion with a configuration of passive markers fitted on the patient's thoraco-abdominal region. The proposed method, based on a mapping procedure, has been compared with respiratory gating, that is commonly used in radiotherapy and biomedical imaging applications. The results show that the implemented procedure is adequately able to compensate for motion, resulting in quantitative surface description to be used for clinical evaluation.