The horizons of the exhibit “FACES”: anthropological context and applications in medicine

The exhibition FACES. The Many Visages of Human History is, in its own way, a landmark of the work that Arc Team, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Padua and Antrocom NPO are making together.

The reconstructions of the faces of hominins; of St. Anthony and of  the Blessed Luca Belludi; of Francesco Petrarca and of Giambattista Morgagni, are the evidence of a research that lasted for months and that continues nowadays; a research intended to be expanded to other areas of interest.

In fact, the exhibition offers to the visitors the opportunity to reflect on concepts meaningful to anthropology as diversity, self-perception and identity from the point of view both historical and  contemporary, but it is also a mirror of a continuous testing of technologies that open new perspectives in different areas of anthropological research.

Staying in the wake of the topics of the exhibition, there is no doubt that the perception of the self and diversity are important parameters in the assessments of medical anthropology, especially if the feedback on them are carried out in the light of the implementation of new technologies and 3D printing, in particular applied in medicine.

For example, the prostheses that can be constructed, even printed, in a relatively short time and custom-made for the patient. We have a lot of examples from this point of view:  the mandible custom-made for a 83 years old woman or the cranium completely replaced in a 22 years old Dutch patient; or the realization of live organs, such as liver, tracheal cartilage and ear directly using living cells.

More, forensic reconstruction is a valuable tool in reconstructive surgery: examples of implementation, in this context, are the reconstruction of the face of Albert of Trento via open source software, or of the face of a child mummy preserved at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

I shall focus in particular on an implementation made by Cicero Moraes in order to treat the developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH), a neonatal congenital malformation and treatable using Pavlik harness or making a particular plaster cast (hip spica cast). There may be, in severe cases, even a type of orthopedic surgery.

This treatment involves a continuous monitoring of the patient because of its complications: pain, increased temperature, lesions of the skin. Moraes, together with researchers Munhoz, Kunkel and Tanaka, has implemented an alternative method to the common orthosis consisting in a photogrammetric scanning of the hip in order to replicate the perfect geometry of the anatomical part, with reduction of costs and time and avoiding complications to the patient.

The aims of our research are gradually expanding and we know that we have to do still a lot of work. It's a good thing, however, that we stopped for a moment to take stock of the situation and to recognize that we are helping to improve the state of affairs. Not only in archeology and anthropology, but also in other fields thanks to the scope of what we are doing. A result achieved thanks to motivated individuals who, despite residing in geographic areas far apart, have joined efforts to reach a common goal by sharing data and projects.

A study day in honor of Prof. Franco Ugo Rollo

Next week, on November 26, will be held a study day in honor of Prof. Franco Ugo Rollo, the famous anthropologist at the University of Camerino who sadly left us this year.

I have been invited to participate in the event, which will take place in Ascoli Piceno and Monsampolo del Tronto, where the Professor analyzed the mummy which are now exposed in the Museum of the Crypt of the S. Mary Church.

During the first session in Ascoli (in the morning) Prof. Gino Fornaciari (University of Pisa) will give a presentation titled "Fra principi e mummie: le origini della paleopatologia moderna" (en: "Between princes and mummies: the origin of modern palaeopathology". Later, Marco Samadelli, of EURAC, will speak about "Life Traces. Alla ricerca della vita nel microcosmo: batteri psicrofili e psicrotolleranti nella mummia dei ghiacci" (en: "Life Traces. Searching the life into the microcosm: psychrophilic  and psicrotollerant bacteria in the ice mummy"). Before the lunch break I will talk about "Volti in byte: le tecnologie digitali per la ricostruzione dei volti del passato" (en "Faces in bytes: new digital technologies for the forensic facial reconstruction of historical figures").

The second session will take place in Monsampolo, with a guided tour in the Museum of the St. Mary's crypt.

The event is organized by the University of Camerino (Scuola di Bioscienze e Medicina Veterinaria; Scuola di Scienze e Tecnologie, Corso di Laurea in Tecnologie e diagnostica per la conservazione e il restauro) and the municipalities of Ascoli Piceno and Monsampolo del Tronto. 

IMHO the study day promises to be interesting and it is worth to attend for people living in the nearby. For more information I publish here the official poster:

The poster of the event

A Georgian mission: food for thought

Working as professionals in archeology sometimes means to be involved in projects abroad. Between Monday 22 and Friday 26 September 2014 Arc-Team participate in organizing a mission in Georgia to document the skulls of Dmanisi (Homo georgicus), in order to perform the facial reconstructions for the open source exhibition "Facce. I molti volti della storia umana" (en: "Faces. The many aspects of human history").

Dmanisi's panorama

The work was possible thanks to the kindness of Prof. David Lordkipanidze (of the Georgian National Museum) and to the precious help in logistic organization of our colleague and friend Zviad Sherazadishvili.

The excavation site

During the mission, carried out with Nicola Carrara (of the Anthropological Museum of the University of Padua), I had the opportunity to take some pictures regarding traditional food in Georgia and "pay my debt" with Lucia Galasso (according to this post).
This is the material I collect:

1. An Adjarian Khachapuri (one of my favorite Georgian dishes), served in a restaurant in Tbilisi.

Adjarian Khachapuri

2. Some Khinkali, for a fast lunch in Dmanisi.

Khinkali

3. A shop selling Churchkhela in Tbiblisi (for a good dessert).

Churchkhela

I hope this post will be useful for food culture specialists, helping to discover and appreciate the culinary traditions of Georgia.
Once again I have to thank my friend Zviad Sherazadishvili for the kindness and help in organizing the mission!

Group photo in Dmanisi

From Youtube to Blender: Forensic facial reconstruction of a child mummy

This post is about a practical application of a serie of studies published here in this blog.

After I started to study about forensic facial reconstruction I saw that is much more easy to find videos of CT-Scan than the DICOM files and other tomography formats.

A way to convert a video in a reconstructed mesh was described here.

Some days ago I was reading about mummies (desperate to find a CT-Scan) and I found this post:

http://erl.wustl.edu/research/imseg/mummy.html

It talks about a child mummy of St. Louis, that lived in a range of 40 BC and 130 AD. He died with 7 or 8 months.

Inside the matter had a video with some seconds of a CT-Scan slicing. I was able to convert it in a reconstructed mesh, and after I found a video on Youtbe with more qualty and I used it to make the final mesh, used in this post.

I downloaded the video with Videodownload Helper (Firefox) and it was converted in a image sequence and after in a serie of DICOM files.

Unfortunately I lost the original vetorial file and now we have only the infographic in Portuguese version, like you can see below (but it have a lot of images, that dispensing you to read it).

To make a reconstruction with historical and archaeological foundation I had the help of Moacir Elias Santos, archaeologist of the Egypt Museum and Rosacruz, from Brazil.

The animated gif above shows the extracted frames of the animation converted into a CT-Scan. I reduced the slices to make it more didatic.

I had a serie of dificulties to find landmarks to use on the child's face, cause appear that it doesn't exist. So I use a average of 3-8 year and rescale it to have at least a reference.

I use a serie of babies pictures to draw the line of the neck and ears.

Moacir sent me a compose image with the original mummy, that you can see below.

I hope you enjoy this post. I see you in the next. A big hug!

Kinect 3D limits: documentation of small objects

As Moreno Tiziani wrote in his post, last Monday (October 22) I was in Padua to start the "Taung Project". The first step of this research was indeed the 3D documentation of the cast of the Taung Child, preserved in the Museum of Anthropology of Padua University. 

To digitally register our subject we chose SfM/IBM techniques (using ArcheOS and PPT), because, as I reported in this post, the methodology is accurate enough to document small objects. Nevertheless I brought in Padua also our hacked Kinect, to show Moreno how this system is working in 3D recording operations. 

Red circle: Kinect. Green circle Taung Child's cast. Blue circle: RGBDemo compiling on ArcheOS

 As we thought, the cast was too small to be documented with Kinect. The reason is clear: when Kinect is too close, it simply does not "see" the subject to record, while when the device is too far away, it register too few 3D points, so that the final mesh is not accurate enough. 

Unfortunately, I did not capture a screenshot of our test, but I think the images below illustrate the concept: in the first picture my hand is to close to the sensor and it appears completely black, while in the second picture Kinect can see my hand, which appears pink, but the resolution is too low.

The sensor is too close to the subject

The distance between the sensor and the subject is adequate, but the resolution is too low

However we used Kinect to document something in the Museum of Anthropology: a wooden Egyptian sarcophagus. 

As you can see in the short movie below, we registered just one side of the object, for the same reason I explained before: when Kinect is too close to the subject it does not work properly. In this case the position of the sarcophagus was too close to the wall (almost 50 cm) and to a glass showcase (almost 20 cm). It would have been possible to scan all the three visible faces and join them together in post-processing with MeshLab, but this was just an experiment, so we concentrate on the Taung cast. 

However in the movie it is also possible to observe another interesting characteristic of Kinect: being an infrared based device it is not able to go through glass, which is registered like a normal opaque object.

I hope it was useful, have a nice day!

July 27, 2011 - July 27, 2012: a year of ATOR

Hello all,

today ATOR reaches its first year, so I thought to post and analyze some statistics to see how this experiment of shared research is progressing.

Until now we have six active authors, who wrote 79 posts. The community reacted with 96 comments, although most of them are written by the authors in response to direct questions from readers. Overall the blog counted 21484 visits (8695 visits since the activation of the Revolver Maps plugin, as you can see in the image below).

Today ATOR has 25 members and the general trend is still growing, but sinlge posts may affect the statistics with an increase of visitors related both to the quality of the post and to the interest aroused by the topic. A good example of this situation is the post of Cicero Moraes about forensic facial reconstruction, which has captured the attention of the community of 3D modelers and of physical anthropologists, reching the peak traffic you can see in June 2012 in the graph below.

The post reached also the attention of Ton Roosendaal (original creator of Blender), who wrote a tweet about it:

Anyway, the main strength of ATOR and of an open approach to research remains the active collaboration between researchers operating in different fields (not only archaeologists). In this case must be placed, for example, the new collaborations with the 3D artist Cicero Moraes (already mentioned) and with the anthropologist Moreno Tiziani, creator of anthropological association Antrocom Onlus, which publishes the Online Journal of Anthropology. 
We will go on working with this open philosopy in archaeology, inspired by the Free/Libre and Open Source Software movement, and to further increase the quality of posts in ATOR with the help of the community. As usual, if you want to collaborate, just contact us! 
Thank you. 

The digitization and fruition of fossil specimens: benefits and consequences

In anthropology, the possibility to reconstruct the features of individuals from their skeletal remains has facilitated and encouraged the forensic anthropology and the bioarchaeology. Besides, it made room to paleoanthropology (above all the paleoneurology), when this option is not applied to the reconstruction of a face, but of the specimen itself.

Why to use a three-dimensional reconstruction of a skeletal specimen? We must consider, in particular, that the paleoanthropological fossils are of great value (not only from the scientific point of view) because these objects are often unique and they can not be handled too frequently to avoid irreparable damages.

Being unique objects, they are rare, and thus the access to them is not easy. And being very old, they need special conditions, monitored constantly to preserved them as best as possible. To move them would be largely a risk. There is also another aspect linked to their uniqueness: the fact that the paleoanthropological fossils are often preserved in places far away and that only a lucky few people can go there.

A three-dimensional reconstruction not only avoids facing a long journey, but also allows you to avoid frequent handling, perhaps hasty, and changes in storage conditions. Moreover, the reconstructions based on detailed scans of the specimens allow measurements much more accurate than if done manually.

Interview to Christoph Zollikofer (Zurich University)

The advantages of such applications are therefore evident and their spread is certainly to be encouraged, especially if the resulting data are shared as much as possible.

When the access to the specimen is severely limited for a variety of reasons and maybe years must pass before you see photos and measurements, the advancement of the discipline is also limited. Data sharing carries in itself another advantage: the discussion between researchers annuls, in this way, the possibility of more or less dubious interpretations by a minority of them. Perhaps the same few people who had access to the specimen.

Also, if data sharing takes place through free software, analysis of the specimen is enhanced by new data and interpretations, in a cascade process that feeds itself. Incidentally, the word "free", in this context, means generically a software to which all those who wish can access, anytime they want. Of course, the freedom of access should be subordinated to the ability to use the software itself.

It's true that an access of this scale and with these tools would lead to consequences of a certain depth both economically and socially. As is the case of goods production, more copies of an object there are, the more its market value is lowered. A unique object becomes, in this way, a commodity.

Following these considerations, an object that is cheap is considered of little value, even on the intrinsic meaning. There is therefore a risk that the specimen, though important, is losing its value in the eyes of one of those visitors came from afar to view it. If not in the eyes of the researchers themselves.

We must not forget that these findings are part of the cultural and scientific heritage of the countries where they were discovered. Often these are developing countries (I think for example to African countries where the most part of fossils of hominids was found) and for these the specimen may mean different possibilities: visibility at the international level, negotiating power, source of income for local populations through the related activities that is generated by the discovery and subsequent museification.

The computerization and the data sharing therefore untie the specimen from its being also a political and economic tool. How much these aspects are taken into account in the process of digitization of specimens and, in general, of data stores? And what can we do to stem the problem, if not to remedy it?

At present, in the absence of specific legislative actions, everyone must rely on his own sense of ethics.