Fitting the Discrete Swept Skeletal Representation to Slabular Objects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new skeletal representation for slabular objects like hippocampi, enabling improved statistical shape analysis for medical diagnosis and research.

Contribution

It proposes a novel locally parameterized discrete swept skeletal model and a fitting procedure based on boundary division and surface flattening.

Findings

The method produces symmetric and tidy skeletal structures.

It outperforms existing skeletal representations in visual and statistical evaluations.

Demonstrated on synthetic and real datasets.

Abstract

Statistical shape analysis of slabular objects like groups of hippocampi is highly useful for medical researchers as it can be useful for diagnoses and understanding diseases. This work proposes a novel object representation based on locally parameterized discrete swept skeletal structures. Further, model fitting and analysis of such representations are discussed. The model fitting procedure is based on boundary division and surface flattening. The quality of the model fitting is evaluated based on the symmetry and tidiness of the skeletal structure as well as the volume of the implied boundary. The power of the method is demonstrated by visual inspection and statistical analysis of a synthetic and an actual data set in comparison with an available skeletal representation.