Gathering 3D body surface scans and anthropometric data as part of an epidemiological health study – Method and results

Abstract

Gathering reliable and up-to-date full datasets of ISO-compliant anthropometric measures is time consuming and expensive. To use synergetic effects an explorative method was tested to use the environment of an existing population-based epidemiological study and extend the study design with additional three-dimensional body surface scans. Besides the standard algorithm based measure extraction, additional 34 ISO 7250-1 measures were extracted by manually identifying 44 anatomical landmarks on the 3D images. High priority was given to quality and reliability of the data. Therefore, standard operating procedures (SOPs) as well as a stringent quality assurance procedure were defined. In addition, three manually taken measures (height, waist-and hip-circumference) were compared to the extracted body scan data. The results of the manual reading process showed ambiguous results: some ISO measures showed a good intra- and interobserver reliability whereas others were difficult to identify on the scan images.