Analysing and Visualizing a Human Body Cartographically

Abstract

Doctors usual/y execute a spatial analysis when diagnosing a disease in a patient. This happens, because the human body is composed of severa/ spatial interdependent layers of information, that describe its functioning and behaviour. The human body organs and systems are described by morphological and physiological data that should be spatially combined by the doctor in arder to evaluate the global patient health condition. On the other hand, most of the models, used to analyze, to process and to visualize these data, do not take into account this strong spatial interdependency inherent to human body 's functioning. These models usually treat morphological and physiological data in a full independent and isolated way. This happens because they are not "spatially" oriented, and do not interpret the human body as a 3D map, being composed by different parts and layers of information. The possibility of combining these layers using spatial algebraic operations, introduces a new degree of information insight. Because of these characteristics, it is important to consider and evaluate the development and usage of a cartographic based model to analyze, represent and visualize human body's data. This is the main goal of the CHUB (Cartographic Human Body) model, which will be introduced in this paper.