Shape and the information in medical images: a decade of the morphometric synthesis

This keynote address reviews several techniques f rom morphometries (the multivariate biometrics of shape) developed mainly in the context of medical image anal-ysis over the last decade. T h e new techniques pro-vide powerful tools f o r geometric tasks that arise in the course of most analyses of medical images i n groups. These tasks include standardizing against Euclidean similarity transformations or shear transformations, en-coding informative prior knowledge about shape varia-tion, and detecting, testing, and visualizing linear sta-tzstical patterns of variation within or between groups. I review the features of the present toolkit, the stan-dard underlying data models entailed, and some of the extensions that reach out to the additional information content of medical images f o r common clznical or sci-entific applications. 1