Using 3D scanners to aid Ukraine

With the war in Ukraine now in its third year, statistics on its devastation makes for grim reading.

As of February this year, the war has seen over 30,000 verified civilian casualties (although Ukraine believes that the real number is seven times higher). Just over 10,000 civilian deaths were confirmed and almost 20,000 injured.

In terms of the damage that the attacking Russian troops have reaped on the built environment,  almost half of Ukrainians in the east and south of the country report that their houses have either been damaged or destroyed, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.

A further 20% of Ukrainians surveyed in the same report added that they or a family member had been injured because of shelling, artillery fire or missile attacks in their country.

The demand for support has never been greater. The country needs help to ensure that its civilians survive, and heal; to help identify those missing, and to try and preserve the country they remember with its buildings, churches, museums, and historical architecture.

Against this context it’s hard at first to see how a piece of 3D scanning kit could be of much use in a war zone, and yet, Luxembourg-based 3D scanning firm, Artec 3D claims that its handheld tech can not only be used for digital preservation of historical architecture but is also helping in terms of identifying missing people as well as aiding burn victims and amputees.

Capturing war crimes

Already, law enforcement is relying on 3D scanners such as Artec’s to capture crime scenes. These scanners are used to enable the relevant authorities to piece together what happened, and to allow any new team or individual that enters the case to view a freeze frame of the crime scene.

3D Scans can also be used during court cases to allow a jury to examine a replica of the evidence in court. Plus, 3D scans are also used to help transport the jury to the scene of the crime, through virtual VR glasses.

The aim in these cases, according to Artec 3D’s president and CEO Artyom Yukhin, is to capture everything accurately and to store as much information as possible.

Artec 3D’s scanners were used to examine the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down in July 2014 in Ukraine by a missile that was recently confirmed to have come from Russia.

As the flight was heading to The Netherlands’ capital Amsterdam from Kuala Lumpur, the Dutch police used the 3D scanners to scan the plane, and piece the aircraft together to prove the missile’s origins.

“This was a big case for us because they put a lot of evidence together using our technology,” says Yukhin. As a result, he adds, the authorities “were able to put the puzzle of all the scanned pieces together, assemble the model of the plane, and to prove where the missile came from.”

As the conflict in Ukraine escalated, Artec 3D received an urgent request from the Kyiv Forensic Institute, an organisation they worked with previously gathering scans on flight MH17.

This time the institute required scanners because it lacked resources to document war crimes, which were happening at an unprecedented level in Ukraine.

Funded by The Defence Ministry of Luxembourg, Artec 3D sent its scanners to Ukraine, and provided online training and support to demonstrate how to effectively capture these crimes, and to help identify missing people.

“They have hundreds of unidentified bodies in terrible conditions, and they don’t know how to identify them, so they use our scanners to do this as part of a 3D forensic reconstruction,” Yukhin explains.

Preserving cultural heritage

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), 56 locations on its World Heritage list are in some form of danger.

In Ukraine alone, UNESCO has reported that 341 cultural sites have been destroyed since Russia’s 2022 invasion, including religious structures, museums, and buildings of historical importance.

A further 15,000 pieces of fine art and artifacts have also been reported missing.

Work on digitally preserving sculptures, monuments, and even entire churches in the tragic event that they are destroyed during the war, is one of the aims of Skeiron, a team from the UNESCO-listed Lviv, best known for kick-starting the #SaveUkrainianHeritage project.

The Skeiron team – together with another scanning firm Koda, used Artec 3D’s handheld device Artec Leo, to digitise structures so that future reconstruction in the event of damage is possible.

Leo claims to be the world’s first wireless and AI-driven scanner with a 5-inch HD display and battery built in. Now, Skeiron’s “Museum in 3D” features more than 200 Ukrainian museum artifacts which have all been scanned by the device and are available to view online in colour.

“It’s a very important project to us,” says Yukhin, who adds that its scanners have also helped preserve heritage during the ISIS occupation when the terrorist organisation held about a third of Syria and 40% of Iraq.

At the time, archaeologists decided to start preserving historical sites after ISIS released videos of its fighters using sledgehammers, power tools, and bulldozers to demolish sculptures, stone carvings, and vandalising Iraq’s Mosul Cultural Museum in the ancient city of Nimrud.

After seeing the footage, French filmmaker Ivan Erhel headed to the country with archaeologist Abdulameer Al Hamdani and photographer Sarmat Beebl, armed with 3D scanners in hand, to digitally preserve the sites.

Prosthetic limbs for amputees

Artec’s scanners are also being used to help create new limbs for amputees. The firm works with organisations such as Handicap International in Rwanda, where it trained local hospitals to work with the scanners to provide children with prosthetic limbs to fit their growing bodies. A similar demand was needed for the victims of the devastating earthquake in Turkey last year.

“You want to make it best fit to the body,” says Yukhin. “It’s a lot of inflammation and irritation because, especially for legs, you put a lot of weight on a very small surface.”

Taking in the specific measurements of each amputee, the hospitals can design prosthetic limbs for each individual, helping to minimise discomfort.

Since the war began in 2022, reports claim that over 20,000 Ukrainians, whether it be civilians or military, have needed amputations, but only a small number have been able to receive either a bionic or prosthetic limb: “This is just to illustrate the demand,” says Yukhin.

Soon, Artec 3D hopes to help burn victims with reconstructing their skin: “Because of the explosions and rockets, there are a lot of people losing large areas of their skin.”

“There are [already] private clinics in France that use our technology to help produce artificial skin,” says Yukhin. Soon, the aim is to help perform the same procedure for injured Ukraine civilians, he adds.