Shape modelling in biological anthropology

You have come a long way during the last weeks. You learned to understand shape models and to build your own models using Scalismo.

Now, let us look into a further application: biological anthropology.

Imagine somebody finds a fragment of a human mandible beneath the autumn leaves.

How did it end up here?

To whom did it belong? One way to answer these questions is to complete the fragment in a way that allows further identification. Maybe, even modelling certain characteristic features in accordance with their statistical occurrence. Later, the results might be checked against parameters of missing persons. This is where biological anthropology comes in. Meet Dr. Stefan Schlager. He works in the Department of Biological Anthropology at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany.

He is a pioneering expert in the field of shape modelling, a wizard when it comes to pushing the envelope of what shape modelling can do. A reconstruction based on a mandible was one of the early assignments he solved for shape modelling.

But today, he uses software to go even further.

He models faces and implants to support surgeons like Dr. Metzger.

He might help answer how a shattered bone has to be reconstructed during surgery.