Grube Sarah, Latus Sarah, Fischer Martin, Raudonis Vidas, Heinemann Axel, Ondruschka Benjamin, Schlaefer Alexander
Institute of Medical Technology and Intelligent Systems, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany.
Faculty of Electricity and Electronics, Kaunas University of Technology, Kaunas, Lithuania.
Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg. 2025 Sep 12. doi: 10.1007/s11548-025-03507-w.
Comprehensive legal medicine documentation includes internal and external examination of the corpse. Typically, this documentation is conducted manually during conventional autopsy. Systematic digital documentation would be desirable, especially for external wound examination, which is becoming more relevant for legal medicine analysis. For this purpose, RGB surface scanning has been introduced. While manual full-surface scanning using a handheld camera is time-consuming and operator-dependent, floor or ceiling-mounted robotic systems require specialized rooms. Hence, we consider whether a mobile robotic system can be used for external documentation.
We develop a mobile robotic system that enables full-body RGB-D surface scanning. Our work includes a detailed configuration space analysis to identify the environmental parameters that must be considered for a successful surface scan. We validate our findings through an experimental study in the lab and demonstrate the systems application in legal medicine.
Our configuration space analysis shows that a good trade-off between coverage and time is reached with three robot base positions, leading to a coverage of 94.96 %. Experiments validate the effectiveness of the system in accurately capturing body surface geometry with an average surface coverage of % and % for a body phantom and actual corpses, respectively.
This work demonstrates the potential of a mobile robotic system to automate RGB-D surface scanning in legal medicine, complementing post-mortem CT scans for inner documentation. Our results indicate that the proposed system can contribute to more efficient, autonomous legal medicine documentation, reducing the need for manual intervention.
全面的法医学记录包括尸体的内部和外部检查。通常，这种记录是在传统尸检过程中手动进行的。系统性的数字记录将是可取的，特别是对于外部伤口检查，这对法医学分析变得越来越重要。为此，已引入RGB表面扫描。虽然使用手持相机进行手动全表面扫描既耗时又依赖操作员，但安装在地面或天花板上的机器人系统需要专门的房间。因此，我们考虑是否可以使用移动机器人系统进行外部记录。
我们开发了一种能够进行全身RGB-D表面扫描的移动机器人系统。我们的工作包括详细的配置空间分析，以确定成功进行表面扫描必须考虑的环境参数。我们通过实验室的实验研究验证了我们的发现，并展示了该系统在法医学中的应用。
我们的配置空间分析表明，通过三个机器人基座位置可以在覆盖范围和时间之间取得良好的平衡，覆盖率达到94.96%。实验验证了该系统在准确捕捉身体表面几何形状方面的有效性，对于人体模型和实际尸体，平均表面覆盖率分别为 %和 %。
这项工作展示了移动机器人系统在法医学中自动化RGB-D表面扫描的潜力，可补充用于内部记录的死后CT扫描。我们的结果表明，所提出的系统可以有助于更高效、自主的法医学记录，减少人工干预的需求。
