Probabilistic Modeling of Anatomical Variability Using a Low Dimensional Parameterization of Diffeomorphisms

The study of anatomical shape variability across populations and its relationship with disease processes plays an important role in medical image analysis. For example, identifying pathological brain shape changes caused by neurodegenerative disorders from brain MRI scans provides new insights into the nature of the disease and supports treatment  (Gerig et al., 2001; Nemmi et al., 2015). Research in shape analysis mainly focuses on developing statistical models with well defined shape descriptors such as landmarks (Cootes et al., 1995; Bookstein, 1997), medial axes (Pizer et al., 1999), and deformation-based representations  (Christensen et al., 1993).

Source: Medical Image Analysis - July 6, 2017 Category: Radiology Authors: Miaomiao Zhang, William M. Wells, Polina Golland Source Type: research