8 - Deformable Models

Abstract

The rapid development and proliferation of medical imaging technologies is revolutionizing medicine. Medical imaging allows scientists and physicians to glean potentially life-saving information by peering noninvasively into the human body. The role of medical imaging has expanded beyond the simple visualization and inspection of anatomic structures. It has become a tool for surgical planning and simulation, intraoperative navigation, radiotherapy planning, and tracking the progress of disease. This chapter surveys deformable models, a promising and vigorously researched model-based approach to computer assisted medical image analysis. The widely recognized potency of deformable models stems from their ability to segment, match, and track images of anatomic structures by exploiting, bottom–up, constraints derived from the image data together with, top–down, a prior knowledge about the location, size, and shape of these structures. The increasingly important role of medical imaging in the diagnosis and treatment of disease has opened an array of challenging problems centered on the computation of accurate geometric models of anatomic structures from medical images. Deformable models offer an attractive approach to tackling such problems, because these models are able to represent the complex shapes and broad shape variability of anatomical structures. Deformable models overcome many of the limitations of traditional low-level image processing techniques, by providing compact and analytical representations of object shape, by incorporating anatomic knowledge, and by providing interactive capabilities.