A Novel Objective Approach to the External Measurement of Pectus Excavatum Severity by Means of an Optical Device

Abstract

The optical 3D index has a good match with the average subjective assessment in distinguishing patients with mild to severe PE. This innovative approach offers several advantages over existing indices, as it is repeatable and does not require cross-sectional imaging. The index might be particularly suitable for monitoring the efficacy of nonoperative treatment and, in the future, for designing an optimal personalized usage of therapeutic devices.

Non-Contact Respiratory Measurement Using a Depth Camera for Elderly People

“…Therefore, our method cannot be applied to subjects with imbalanced thoracic motion such as pectus excavatum. For such subjects, different methods will be necessary [22].…”

Handheld Optical System for Pectus Excavatum Assessment

“…In order to develop an accurate and handheld chest scanner, a remodeling process of the body scanner presented by the authors in [21] was carried out by T3Ddy lab., a joint research center between Meyer's Children Hospital (Italy) and the Department of Industrial Engineering of Florence (Italy). The previous scanner ( Figure 1) consists of an RGB-D device coupled with control software.…”

“…With the aim of creating an easy-to-use instrument capable of quantitatively measuring chest deformation, in a previous work, we developed an optical acquisition system along with semiautomatic processing software capable of providing a rapid quantitative measurement of the chests of pectus patients [21]. Such a novel 3D body scanner eliminated the need for any manual setup and reduced the acquisition time to a fraction of a second, allowing us to easily analyze pre-and post-treatment severity of the chest wall deformity.…”

“…Furthermore, through several studies, external measurement parameters were defined to best describe the condition of each patient and to allow the monitoring of the progression of the pathology over time. For the definition of such chest indices, the state of the art was carefully evaluated with regard to both optical indices and measurements commonly extracted from tomographic images [21,22]. Despite the system devised in [20] proving to be effective in providing an objective assessment of the PE severity, it had some drawbacks.…”

“…The new system proposed in this work can be considered a novel handheld version of the body scanner proposed in [21], redesigned to facilitate data collection and analysis, to provide nonexpert users with state-of-the-art 3D modeling systems. In detail, the hardware component has been redesigned and revalorized to allow for smoother use in the outpatient clinic environment, and the software component has been updated to be more user-oriented and evaluated in terms of usability for both medical staff and domestic use.…”