Biomedicine and the natural sciences are, at their core, spatial disciplines: their objects are structures in space, from organs and tissues down to cells and molecules, and understanding them means reasoning about shape, arrangement, and interaction in three dimensions. This chapter turns the spatial-intelligence capabilities of the previous part onto that setting, where in both of its cases the unit of value is the same: a metrically faithful 3D model of a specific physical system, kept in correspondence with real measurements.
In medicine, that model is patient-specific, and it drives a closed loop running from imaging through planning to image-guided intervention. In the natural sciences the same perception and reconstruction machinery operates several orders of magnitude smaller, at the molecular and cellular scale, where the structures reconstructed are the very objects of scientific explanation.