68U01 General
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The reconstruction of geometric shapes plays an important role in many biomedical applications. One example is the patient-specific, computer-aided planning of complex interventions, which requires the generation of explicitly represented geometric models of anatomical structures from medical image data. Only solutions that require minimal interaction by medical personnel are likely to enter clinical routine. Another example is the planning of surgical corrections of deformities where the target shape is unknown. Surgeons are often forced to resort to subjective criteria. These applications still pose highly challenging reconstruction problems, which are addressed in this thesis. The fundamental hypothesis, pursued in this thesis, is that the problems can be solved by incorporating a-priori knowledge about shape and other application-specific characteristics. Here, we focus mainly on the aspect of geometric shape analysis. The basic idea is to capture the most essential variations of a certain class of geometric objects via statistical shape models, which model typical features contained in a given population, and restrict the outcome of a reconstruction algorithm (more or less) to the space spanned by such models. A fundamental prerequisite for performing statistical shape analysis on a set of different objects is the identification of corresponding points on their associated surfaces. This problem is particularly difficult to solve if the shapes stem from different individuals. The reason lies in the basic difficulty of defining suitable measures of similarity. In this thesis, we divide the correspondence problem into feature and non-feature matching. The feature part depends on the application, while the non-feature part can be characterized by a purely geometric description. We propose two different approaches. The first approach has proved useful in many applications. Yet, it suffers from some practical limitations and does not yield a measure of similarity. Our second, variational, approach is designed to overcome these limitations. In it, we propose to minimize an invariant stretching measure, constrained by previously computed features. An important property, which sets our method apart from previous work, is that it does not require the computation of a global surface parameterization.
This paper presents an automatic approach for segmentation of the liver from computer tomography (CT) images based on a 3D statistical shape model. Segmentation of the liver is an important prerequisite in liver surgery planning. One of the major challenges in building a 3D shape model from a training set of segmented instances of an object is the determination of the correspondence between different surfaces. We propose to use a geometric approach that is based on minimizing the distortion of the correspondence mapping between two different surfaces. For the adaption of the shape model to the image data a profile model based on the grey value appearance of the liver and its surrounding tissues in contrast enhanced CT data was developed. The robustness of this method results from a previous nonlinear diffusion filtering of the image data. Special focus is turned to the quantitative evaluation of the segmentation process. Several different error measures are discussed and implemented in a study involving more than 30 livers.
We introduce a new method for reconstructing a triangular surface from an unorganized set of points in space. It is based on placing a probe sphere on the point set and rolling it around, connecting all triples of points with a triangle that the sphere comes to rest on. Therefore, the algorithm interpolates, rather than approximates, the input points. The method needs considerably less running time than previous algorithms and yields good results on point sets that are reasonably well-behaved.