Manual anthropometrics are used extensively in medical practice and epidemiological studies to assess an individual's health. However, traditional techniques reduce the complicated shape of human bodies to a series of simple size measurements and derived health indices, such as the body mass index (BMi), the waist-hip-ratio (WHR) and waist-by-height 0.5 ratio (WHT.5R). Three-dimensional (3D) imaging systems capture detailed and accurate measures of external human form and have the potential to surpass traditional measures in health applications. the aim of this study was to investigate how shape measurement can complement existing anthropometric techniques in the assessment of human form. Geometric morphometric methods and principal components analysis were used to extract independent, scale-invariant features of torso shape from 3D scans of 43 male participants. Linear regression analyses were conducted to determine whether novel shape measures can complement anthropometric indices when estimating waist skinfold thickness measures. Anthropometric indices currently used in practice explained up to 52.2% of variance in waist skinfold thickness, while a combined regression model using WHT.5R and shape measures explained 76.5% of variation. Measures of body shape provide additional information regarding external human form and can complement traditional measures currently used in anthropometric practice to estimate central adiposity. Measurements of size and shape of the human body are an important source of information for a range of scientific fields and applications. Traditional manual anthropometrics have been used extensively in medical practice and epidemiological studies to derive health risk indicators, since it has been suggested that human body shape is dependent on its underlying composition, including soft and skeletal tissues 1. Indices, such as the body mass index (BMI), waist girth and the waist-hip ratio (WHR) are used to assess variations in human body dimensions and physical health 2-4. Of these, BMI is most commonly used in current practice to determine the healthy weight range for individuals based on their height. However, BMI fails to distinguish between quantities of muscle and fat, which are of different density, and therefore is prone to misclassifying muscular individuals as being overweight or obese 5,6. Size measures, such as sagittal diameter, waist girth and WHT.5R have been found to demonstrate improved correlations with quantities of abdominal visceral fat and greater associations with metabolic disease risks compared to BMI 7,8. Relative measures, such as the WHR, provide information about the size of the abdomen relative to the rest of the body, so has been used as a proxy of torso shape and central obesity, defined as excess fat around the abdominal region 7. However, these relatively simple approaches to measuring external human form only utilise a small number of manual anthropometrics, which are prone to human error and limited by their simplicity, as they do not fully describe ...