Abstract: This paper presents a new method for constructing an example-based deformable human hand model from medical images. Realistic animation of human hands requires good estimates of the joint structure and properly weighted skeleton-driven surface deformation. For this purpose, we propose a method based on medical images of hands in several poses. Our method consists of the following 3 steps: First, using the measured bone shapes, we estimate the link structure (joint rotation centers) and the joint angles of each scan. Second, we construct a mutually consistent polygonal mesh of all the scans. For this purpose, a polygonal mesh of one pose, the base mesh, is deformed using skeletal subspace deformation, and then fitted interactively to the measured meshes from the other scans. Finally, the hand is deformed using a weighted pose space deformation. We demonstrate results of deformable hand models consisting of 100,000 triangle meshes derived from CT scans.