and 14 a is mounted to a rotating pin not shown so the laser profile can be swept along the length of burrow 12 perpendicular to the orientation of the projected laser profile 16 and 18 two cmos cameras 20 and 20 a are also mounted on the gantry 24 shown in fig6 and 7 to image the laser profile 16 as it sweeps across one side of the subject cmos cameras 20 and 20 a are preferably mounted away from the central plane of rotation of so they can view the laser profile 16 at an angle of from about 45 u00b0 to about 60 u00b0 from the axis of gantry rotation a second pair of cmos cameras 21 and 21 a are mounted to image the profile of laser 14 a as it sweeps across the opposite side of the subject two cameras are needed per side to eliminate surface occlusions the height information extracted by each camera 39 s on chip processor is used to build two complete surfaces of the opposite sides of the subject because the geometry of the system is fixed the two surfaces can be straightforwardly aligned and merged into a single data set for later registration to the surface extracted from the x ray ct volume while there will be partially incomplete data at the boundary where the two surfaces meet this will not prevent effective registration of the laser profilometry surface to the extracted x ray ct surface a variety of laser cmos.