Publication Date:
2023-03-20
Description:
Statistical shape models learn to capture the most characteristic geometric variations of anatomical structures given samples from their population. Accordingly, shape models have become an essential tool for many medical applications and are used in, for example, shape generation, reconstruction, and classification tasks. However, established statistical shape models require precomputed dense correspondence between shapes, often lack robustness, and ignore the global surface topology. This thesis presents a novel neural flow-based shape model that does not require any precomputed correspondence. The proposed model relies on continuous flows of a neural ordinary differential equation to model shapes as deformations of a template. To increase the expressivity of the neural flow and disentangle global, low-frequency deformations from the generation of local, high- frequency details, we propose to apply a hierarchy of flows. We evaluate the performance of our model on two anatomical structures, liver, and distal femur. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in providing an expressive and robust shape prior, as indicated by its generalization ability and specificity. More so, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our shape model on shape reconstruction tasks and find anatomically plausible solutions. Finally, we assess the quality of the emerging shape representation in an unsupervised setting and discriminate healthy from pathological shapes.
Language:
English
Type:
masterthesis
,
doc-type:masterThesis
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