Noninvasive automatic breast volume estimation for post-mastectomy breast reconstructive surgery

Automatic computation of breast volume data is required in post-mastectomy breast reconstructive surgery, where it is very useful to have an estimate of the volume of the tissue to be extracted in advance of the operation. Such an automated process is essential when conducting studies on large patient databases where manual volume estimation is both tedious and subjective. In this paper, we present a noninvasive automatic breast volume estimation method. It employs 3D scanned data of the torso. First, a surface underneath the breast that resembles a 'breast-less' torso is automatically constructed, and then the volume of the breast is estimated as a function of the difference between the new surface and the actual breast. We have performed a number of experiments on both synthetic and real data with very encouraging results.