ABSTRACT 
Over the years, many exploratory studies in biomedical 
stereophotogrammetry have been undertaken by investigators around the 
world. Unfortunately, relatively little has been done to collate and 
review these wide-ranging contributions and, consequently, there has 
been much unnecessary repetition and considerable wastage of time, 
talent and energy. 
The present review, which includes several: hundred references, 
provides a broad overview of previous applications of biomedical 
stereophotogrammetry. It also exposes some reasons for the absence of 
routine applications, such as the serious lack of sustained programmatic 
research and the limited development of appropriate instrumentation for 
biomedical work. In spite of these handicaps, the evidence that 
photogrammetric engineering has much to offer the biomedical sciences 
and clinical medicine is indisputable. 
INTRODUCTION 
Most people are amazed at the myriad forms in nature. But 
biomedical specialists are also struck by the great mysteries of health 
and disease which are still locked up in these complex expressions of 
spatio-temporal order and disorder. Why do living things take the shapes 
and sizes that they do? Why do human beings and other organisms 
follow certain predictable changes in shape and size during maturation 
and growth? Why do some children’s spines become pathologically 
deformed at the age of ten or eleven? Why and how is the configuration 
of a molecule related to its biochemical properties? Finding answers to 
these and many related questions is a continuing challenge to workers in 
the biomedical sciences and clinical medicine. Nevertheless, it is widely 
acknowledged that methods of measuring living human and animal 
structures in three dimensions have remained primitive compared to 
other areas of biomedical instrumentation. In these circumstances, it 
seems obvious that development of a suitable mode of stereometric 
(three-dimensional) measurement can play a vitally important 
role——which brings us to the subject of stereophotogrammetry. 
Investigators in several countries have demonstrated the capabilities 
of stereophotogrammetry for sensing, measuring and analyzing organic 
form in three dimensions and changes in form, such as in movement or 
growth, which involve the fourth dimension of time. Yet, in spite of 
these efforts, stereophotogrammetry has remained. almost exclusively an 
experimental technique and failed to establish a real niche in th 
biomedical world. No doubt, many factors have contributed to this 
situation, including poor communication between medical and