# Most Efficient Way of Creating a Thickness Map

**URL:** <https://discourse.slicer.org/t/most-efficient-way-of-creating-a-thickness-map/18203>\
**Category:** Support\
**Created:** [June 18, 2021, 12:45pm UTC](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/most-efficient-way-of-creating-a-thickness-map/18203 "2021-06-18T12:45:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![lassoan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/discourse.slicer.org/lassoan/32/13_2.png) [@lassoan](https://discourse.slicer.org/u/lassoan)\
**Post date:** [June 18, 2021, 8:16pm UTC](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/most-efficient-way-of-creating-a-thickness-map/18203/2 "2021-06-18T20:16:50Z")

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Thickness-Mapping module should work well if you want to measure thickness along a certain axis.

Otherwise, I would recommend using the workflow described here:

> [@How to analyze the thickness of the model](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/how-to-analyze-the-thickness-of-the-model/2735/2):
>
> “Thickness” is not a very well defined term for models (surface meshes), but for shell-like meshes it is probably not too difficult to estimate it robustly and accurately. Potential approaches: A. Extract medial surface and estimate thickness as 2x of distance from medial surface. There are various ways of computing these in Slicer. One possible workflow: Compute medial surface using Simple Filters module - BinaryThinningImageFilter. Compute distance map using Simple Filters module - Daniels…

You need to use a segmentation that contains the entire skull bone (not just the thin cortical surfaces but the internal cancellous bone as well).

You don’t need to use Shape Population Viewer to see the color overlay, just go to Models module and click “Visible” checkbox in Display / Scalars section (and select distance as active scalar, if it has not been selected already).

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