Introduction: Characterizing and classifying torso deformities associated with scoliosis is very challenging. One of the problems hindering the achievement of a consensus about these issues is the absence of a centralized and intuitive resource where scoliotic torso deformities can be visualized and interpreted by anyone in the spinal deformity research community.
Objectives: To provide an easy to use and readily available tool to help clinicians interpret databases of scoliotic torso surfaces.
Materials and Methods: An initial sample of torso surfaces comprised of preoperative scoliotic patients was selected (details about the sample composition are available online). Those surfaces were registered non-rigidly together using a method developed for 3D anthropometric measurements in order to build a common parameterization. Then, a web-based visualization tool was developed to visualize animated 3D torso models reconstructed by interactively combining the principal modes of variations found using the re-parameterized models. Also, because this visualization tool uses the Java Web Start technology, it is readily available to most authorized users equipped with an Internet connection and a recent web-browser.
Results: All the torso surfaces were successfully registered and re-parameterized. Clinicians and researchers can thus now easily visualize the typical torso shape variations associated with a group of scoliotic patients by accessing a simple website. Those results are available at: www.humanshape.net/scoliosis/irssd2010.html.
Conclusion and Significance: The proposed tool is a very efficient platform to share information about 3D models, which is extremely useful for a wide variety of research problems such as the classification and characterization of external torso deformities.