NAKO Ribcage SSM
Statistical and surface-based shape modelling of the human rib cage
This site is the interactive companion to the manuscript How Sex, Age, Adiposity, and Smoking Shape the Human Rib Cage: Evidence from 26,275 Whole-Body MRIs across the German National Cohort (NAKO). It hosts the full text and supplement with interactive versions of every figure, a browser-based viewer for the statistical shape model, and pointers to the source code and the released model.
Summary
We built a surface-based statistical shape model (SSM) of the complete 24-rib cage from 26,275 standardised whole-body MRI scans of adults aged 19–74 years in the population-based German National Cohort (NAKO). Ribs were segmented with a deep-learning pipeline, reconstructed as per-rib surface meshes, brought into dense vertex-wise correspondence by Gaussian-process morphable registration, and summarised by generalised Procrustes analysis and principal component analysis (PCA). Fourteen per-rib geometric descriptors link the abstract PCA modes to named shape features, and associations with sex, age, body size and composition, and smoking exposure were estimated by multivariable regression with false-discovery-rate control.
Shape variation is strongly concentrated: 28 modes capture 95% of the total variance, and the first three alone account for 69.4% (PC1 42.6%, PC2 16.3%, PC3 10.5%). They admit consistent anatomical readings – a sexually dimorphic axis (PC1; Cohen’s d = 2.52 between the sexes), a slender-versus-stout body-habitus contrast (PC2), and a free-rib-size axis at ribs 11–12 (PC3). Body mass and body-fat percentage are the dominant modifiable correlates of rib-cage shape, whereas the association with cumulative smoking exposure is comparatively small.
On this site
| Page | Content |
|---|---|
| Manuscript | Full text with interactive figures; also as PDF. |
| Supplement | Supplementary methods, figures, and tables; also as PDF. |
| SSM Viewer | Deform the mean rib cage along principal components or from a demographic profile. |
| Data & Code | Source code, canonical pipeline run, shape-model release, NAKO data access. |
| References | Bibliography with DOI links and BibTeX download. |
Acknowledgement
We thank all participants of the German National Cohort (NAKO) and the staff of this research initiative. Members and affiliations of the NAKO Investigator Consortium can be accessed via www.nako.de/principal-investigators.
Cite this work
Zenodo (model data)
Aicher A, Graf R, Kirschke J, Frauenfelder T, Ensle F, Menze B, Decker J, Kröncke T, Haubold J, Ringhof S, Bamberg F, Schmidt CO, Wielpütz M, Leitzmann M, Willich SN, Keil T, Niendorf T, Pischon T, Schlett C, Möller H. NAKO Human Ribcage Statistical Shape Model (version 1.1.0) [data set]. Zenodo; 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22230693GitHub (software)
Aicher A, Graf R, Kirschke J, Frauenfelder T, Ensle F, Menze B, Decker J, Kröncke T, Haubold J, Ringhof S, Bamberg F, Schmidt CO, Wielpütz M, Leitzmann M, Willich SN, Keil T, Niendorf T, Pischon T, Schlett C, Möller H. NAKO Human Ribcage Statistical Shape Model (version 1.1.0) [software]. GitHub; 2026. https://github.com/AnatolAicher/NAKO-Ribcage-SSMPreprint
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Peer-reviewed article
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@software{Aicher2026NAKORibcageSSM,
author = {Aicher, Anatol and Graf, Robert and Kirschke, Jan and Frauenfelder, Thomas and
Ensle, Falko and Menze, Bjoern and Decker, Josua and Kr{\"o}ncke, Thomas and
Haubold, Johannes and Ringhof, Steffen and Bamberg, Fabian and Schmidt, Carsten Oliver and
Wielp{\"u}tz, Mark and Leitzmann, Michael and Willich, Stefan N. and Keil, Thomas and
Niendorf, Thoralf and Pischon, Tobias and Schlett, Christopher and M{\"o}ller, Hendrik},
title = {{NAKO} Human Ribcage Statistical Shape Model},
version = {1.1.0},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Zenodo},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.22230693},
url = {https://github.com/AnatolAicher/NAKO-Ribcage-SSM}
}Figures and numbers on this site were rendered from pipeline run full_analysis-ab26a74 (2026-08-09 22:55 UTC), code revision ab26a74.