Simulation of breathing for medical applications
Thierry J. Maldonado, Joan Lasenby · 2011
This work describes further research on the Structured Light Plethysmography (SLP) [de Boer et al. 2010] project which is a non-invasive method for pulmonary function testing using visible light. This technique uses two cameras and a known grid which is projected onto the chest of a patient. Using stereo vision algorithms, the 3D coordinates of each grid point projected on the chest wall are recovered over time. As the device captures only the front of the chest wall, we cannot infer the absolute volumes of the lungs but only volume changes of the thoracic cage. However, when it comes to examining respiratory function in a patient, absolute volumes represent a crucial piece of information. In order to address this problem we use optimisation techniques to fit SLP data to a highly detailed 3D model of the human torso (composed of rigid parts and muscles) that we have created. Our simulation provides us with both the optimal muscle inputs to simulate breathing - to date, these muscle activations have remained mysterious and been simplified to sine functions in the literature - and the absolute volumes of the lungs for a given SLP dataset.