CHUB: a cartographic human body model

Abstract

There are several ways of analyzing and modeling the human body and its associated morphological and physiological data. Most of the models, used to analyze, to process and to visualize these data, do not take into account the strong spatial interdependency inherent to human body’s functioning. For instance, a disease in the liver might impact in several other organs. These models usually treat morphological and physiological data in a full independent and isolated way. This happens because they are not “spatially” oriented. The human body can be compared to a 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.