HIT: Estimating Internal Human Implicit Tissues from the Body Surface

Marilyn Keller, Vaibhav Arora, Abdelmouttaleb Dakri, Shivam Chandhok, Jürgen Machann, Andreas Fritsche, Michael J. Black, Sergi Pujades; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 3480-3490

The creation of personalized anatomical digital twins is important in the fields of medicine computer graphics sports science and biomechanics. To observe a subject's anatomy expensive medical devices (MRI or CT) are required and the creation of the digital model is often time-consuming and involves manual effort. Instead we leverage the fact that the shape of the body surface is correlated with the internal anatomy; e.g. from surface observations alone one can predict body composition and skeletal structure. In this work we go further and learn to infer the 3D location of three important anatomic tissues: subcutaneous adipose tissue (fat) lean tissue (muscles and organs) and long bones. To learn to infer these tissues we tackle several key challenges. We first create a dataset of human tissues by segmenting full-body MRI scans and registering the SMPL body mesh to the body surface. With this dataset we train HIT (Human Implicit Tissues) an implicit function that given a point inside a body predicts its tissue class. HIT leverages the SMPL body model shape and pose parameters to canonicalize the medical data. Unlike SMPL which is trained from upright 3D scans MRI scans are acquired with subjects lying on a table resulting in significant soft-tissue deformation. Consequently HIT uses a learned volumetric deformation field that undoes these deformations. Since HIT is parameterized by SMPL we can repose bodies or change the shape of subjects and the internal structures deform appropriately. We perform extensive experiments to validate HIT's ability to predict a plausible internal structure for novel subjects. The dataset and HIT model are available at https://hit.is.tue.mpg.de to foster future research in this direction.