Estimating a patient surface model for optimizing the medical scanning workflow.

In this paper, we present the idea of equipping a tomographic medical scanner with a range imaging device (e.g. a 3D camera) to improve the current scanning workflow. A novel technical approach is proposed to robustly estimate patient surface geometry by a single snapshot from the camera. Leveraging the information of the patient surface geometry can provide significant clinical benefits, including automation of the scan, motion compensation for better image quality, sanity check of patient movement, augmented reality for guidance, patient specific dose optimization, and more. Our approach overcomes the technical difficulties resulting from suboptimal camera placement due to practical considerations. Experimental results on more than 30 patients from a real CT scanner demonstrate the robustness of our approach.