This article surveys deformable models, a promising and vigorously researched computer-assisted medical image analysis technique. Among model-based techniques, deformable models offer a unique and powerful approach to image analysis that combines geometry, physics, and approximation theory. They have proven to be effective in segmenting, matching, and tracking anatomic structures by exploiting (bottom-up) constraints derived from the image data together with (top-down) a priori knowledge about the location, size, and shape of these structures. Deformable models are capable of accommodating the significant variability of biological structures over time and across different individuals. Furthermore, they support highly intuitive interaction mechanisms that, when necessary, allow medical scientists and practitioners to bring their expertise to bear on the model-based image interpretation task. This article reviews the rapidly expanding body of work on the development and application of deformable models to problems of fundamental importance in medical image analysis, includingsegmentation, shape representation, matching, and motion tracking.

The purpose of this chapter is to present a survey of recent publications concerning medical image registration techniques. These publications will be classified according to a model based on nine salient criteria, the main dichotomy of which is extrinsic versus intrinsic methods The statistics of the classification show definite trends in the evolving registration techniques, which will be discussed. At this moment, the bulk of interesting intrinsic methods is either based on segmented points or surfaces, or on techniques endeavoring to use the full information content of the images involved. Keywords: registration, matching Received May 25, 1997

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Automatic computer processing of large multidimensional images such as those produced by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is greatly aided by deformable models, which are used to extract, identify, and quantify specific neuroanatomic structures. A general method of deforming polyhedra is presented here, with two novel features. First, explicit prevention of self-intersecting surface geometries is provided, unlike conventional deformable models, which use regularization constraints to discourage but not necessarily prevent such behavior. Second, deformation of multiple surfaces with intersurface proximity constraints allows each surface to help guide other surfaces into place using model-based constraints such as expected thickness of an anatomic surface. These two features are used advantageously to identify automatically the total surface of the outer and inner boundaries of cerebral cortical gray matter from normal human MR images, accurately locating the depths of the sulci, even where noise and partial volume artifacts in the image obscure the visibility of sulci. The extracted surfaces are enforced to be simple two-dimensional manifolds (having the topology of a sphere), even though the data may have topological holes. This automatic 3-D cortex segmentation technique has been applied to 150 normal subjects, simultaneously extracting both the gray/white and gray/cerebrospinal fluid interface from each individual. The collection of surfaces has been used to create a spatial map of the mean and standard deviation for the location and the thickness of cortical gray matter. Three alternative criteria for defining cortical thickness at each cortical location were developed and compared. These results are shown to corroborate published postmortem and in vivo measurements of cortical thickness. © 2000 Academic Press 1.

The problem of obtaining a mathematical representation of the cortex of the human brain is examined. A parametrization of the outer cortex is first obtained using a deformable surface algorithm which, motivated by the structure of the cortex, is constructed to find the central layer of thick surfaces. Based on this parametrization, a hierarchical representation of the cortical structure is proposed through its depth map and its curvature maps at various scales. Various experiments on magnetic resonance data are presented. I. Introduction The problem of finding and parametrizing boundaries in two- and three-dimensional images is often an important step toward shape visualization and analysis, and has been extensively studied in the image analysis and computer vision literature. Several methods have been proposed, basedboth on bottom-up and top-bottom procedures. One very promising model which combines robustness to noise and the flexibility to represent a broad class of shapes is base...

In this paper, using certain conformal mappings from uniformization theory, we give an explicit method for flattening the brain surface in a way which preserves angles. From a triangulated surface representation of the cortex, we indicate how the procedure may be implemented using finite elements. Further, we show how the geometry of the brain surface may be studied using this approach. Keywords: Brain flattening, functional MRI, harmonic maps, segmentation. This paper has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. 1 Introduction Recently a number of techniques have been proposed to obtain a flattened representation of the cortical surface; see, e.g., [4, 5, 6, 14, 24] and the references therein. Flattening the brain surface has uses in many areas including functional magnetic resonance imaging. Indeed, since it is important to visualize functional magnetic resonance imaging data for neural activity within the three dimensional folds of the brain, ...

Objective. The spatial normalization and registration of tomographic images from different subjects is a major problem in several medical imaging areas, including functional image analysis, morphometrics, and computer aided neurosurgery. The focus of this paper is the development of a computerized methodology for the spatial normalization of 3D images. Materials and Methods. We propose a technique which is based on geometric deformable models. In particular, we first describe a deformable surface algorithm which finds a mathematical representation of the outer cortical surface. Based on this representation, a procedure for obtaining a map between corresponding regions of the outer cortex in two different images is established. This map is subsequently used to derive a three-dimensional elastic warping transformation, which brings two images in register. Results. The performance of our algorithm is demonstrated on several datasets. In particular, we first test our deformable surface a...

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Reconstructing the geometry of the human cerebral cortex from MR images is an important step in both brain mapping and surgical path planning applications. Difficulties with imaging noise, partial volume averaging, image intensity inhomogeneities, convoluted cortical structures, and the requirement to preserve anatomical topology make the development of accurate automated algorithms particularly challenging. In this paper we address each of these problems and describe a systematic method for obtaining a surface representation of the geometric central layer of the human cerebral cortex. Using fuzzy segmentation, an isosurface algorithm, and a deformable surface model, the method reconstructs the entire cortex with the correct topology, including deep convoluted sulci and gyri. The method is largely automated and its results are robust to imaging noise, partial volume averaging, and image intensity inhomogeneities. The performance of this method is demonstrated, both qualitatively and qu...

th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Brighton, England, 2001).