FEMONUM: A Framework for Whole Body Pregnant Woman Modeling from Ante-Natal Imaging Data

Abstract

Anatomical models of pregnant women can be used in several applications such as numerical dosimetry to assess the potential effects of electromagnetic fields on biological tissues, or medical simulations for delivery planning. Recent advances in medical imaging have enabled the generation of realistic and detailed models of human beings. This paper describes FEMONUM, a complete methodological framework for the construction of pregnant woman models based on medical images and their segmentation. FEMONUM combines several computer graphics methods, such as surface reconstruction and physics-based computer animation to model and deform pregnant women abdomens, to simulate different fetal positions and sizes and also different morphologies of the mother, represented with a synthetic woman body envelope. A set of 16 models, anatomically validated by clinical experts, is presented and is made available online to the scientific community. These models include detailed information on the utero-fetal units and cover different gestational stages with various fetal positions.