CHUB: A CARTOGRAPHIC HUMAN BODY MODEL Elizabeth Carvalho University of Minho, School of Engineering, Dept. of Information Systems Campus of Azurém, 4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal Maribel Yasmina Santos University of Minho, School of Engineering, Dept. of Information Systems Campus of Azurém, 4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal Adérito Marcos University of Minho, School of Engineering, Dept. of Information Systems Campus of Azurém, 4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal 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. KEYWORDS Information Visualization, Visualization in Medicine, Visualization Applications, Cartographic Model, Hydrokinetic Therapy. 1. INTRODUCTION The models that are usually used to analyze and visualize human body’s biological, morphological and/or biomedical data do not represent and deal properly with the existing and underlying spatial interdependency. The human body data should not be treated in a segmented manner. Its inner systems (such as cardiac, respiratory, digestive, etc.) functioning depends strongly on each other. The same happens when an illness shows up. Several organs and systems are normally affected at the same time. The doctor diagnoses an illness by comparing and analyzing information not only directly related to the mostly affected organ, but also to the body as a whole. He/she performs a subtle spatial analysis, and therefore, executes a typical algebraic map operation in his/her mind, when diagnosing a patient. It is possible to use a cartographic based model, and take advantage of its inherent spatial nature in order to solve the existing limitations usually present in human body data models [Mitsuru 2001]. The purpose of this paper is to introduce CHUB, a Cartographic Human Body model, which was totally developed taking into account both the main aspects that a cartographic model should satisfy and the special characteristics that human’s body analysis demands. In order to assess the proposed model, the hydrokinetics therapy field was considered as a case study. The main goal of this work is to evaluate the benefits that might be introduced with the use of a cartographic oriented model to analyze and visualize human’s body data. IADIS International Conference Computer Graphics and Visualization 2007 27