Although solar ultraviolet (UV) yields favourable health effects, chronic (occupational) UV exposure is responsible of most epithelial skin cancers. The dose-response between sun exposure and skin cancer occurrence is not yet fully understood. Exposure data is limited because individual exposure assessment is tedious, costly and challenging (prone to epidemiological bias, limited to short-term exposure and specific exposure setting, and cannot account for the large intra-individual (anatomical) variations in UV doses received).
A multidisciplinary team gathering competencies in meteorology, 3D computing sciences, public health and exposure sciences, developed a numeric simulation tool (SimUVEx) to predict anatomical UV exposure. SimUVEx uses 3D computer graphics techniques to compute UV doses based on postural information and ambient UV measurements. It allows assessment of specific exposure scenarios, taking into account body surface inclination, orientation to the sun, shading from other body parts, and radiation component (direct, diffuse, reflected).
Selected applications of SimUVEx to estimate the contribution of occupational UV exposure to the burden of squamous cell carcinoma, to measure the contribution of diffuse UV radiation to exposure patterns of various body sites, and to develop a regression model for predicting UV exposure ratios without individual measurements by anatomical site are presented.
So far, outputs from SimUVEx have enabled to (i) build exposure scenarii (using for instance population-based survey of frequent outdoor occupations), (ii) produce body site-specific reference doses for common outdoor occupational and leisure activities and (iii) identify high-risk situations with respect to over- and under-exposures to sunlight. SimUVEx has contributed to improve our understanding of exposure patterns and identify potential shortcomings in current sun protection recommendations. Current developments, perspectives and limitations of SimUVEx will be discussed.