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Section: Research Program
Computational Anatomy
The objective of the Computational Anatomy (CA) is the modeling and analysis of biological variability of human anatomy. Typical applications cover the simulation of average anatomies and normal variations, the discovery of structural differences between healthy and diseased populations, and the detection and classification of pathologies from structural anomalies (The NIH has lauched the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (60 million USD), a multi-center MRI study of 800 patients who will be followed during several years. The objective will be to establish new surrogate end-points from the automated analysis of temporal sequences. This is a challenging objective for researchers in Computational Anatomy. The data will be made available to qualified research groups involved or not in the study.).
Studying the variability of biological shapes is an old problem (cf. the remarkable book "On Shape and Growth" by D'Arcy Thompson [69] ). Significant efforts have been made since that time to develop a theory for statistical shape analysis (one can refer to [55] for a good synthesis, and to the special issue of Neuroimage [68] for recent developments). Despite all these efforts, there are a number of challenging mathematical issues which remain largely unsolved in general. A particular issue is the computation of statistics on manifolds which can be of infinite dimension (e.g the group of diffeomorphisms).
There is a classical stratification of the problems into the following 3 levels [64] : 1) construction from medical images of anatomical manifolds of points, curves, surfaces and volumes; 2) assignment of a point to point correspondence between these manifolds using a specified class of transformations (e.g. rigid, affine, diffeomorphism); 3) generation of probability laws of anatomical variation from these correspondences.
We plan to focus our efforts to the following problems: