Abstract
In medical image analysis, the three-dimensional (3D) shape representation and modeling of anatomic structures using only a few parameters is an important issue, and can be applied to computer assisted diagnosis, surgical simulations, visualization, and many other medical applications. The conventional statistical shape models are constructed by directly analyzing the shape vector represented by a set of landmark points based on the surface information, which is also called as point distribution models (PDM). In generally PDM used vertexs of surface points for shape representation, as a shape information. However, it is difficult to find the corresponding points among the samples. Therefore, PDM cannot efficiently describe the shape information, especially the global shape information, because of its large number of vertexes. The paper presents an efficient shape representation method using spherical harmonic functions (SPHARM) for 3D anatomical structure such as the liver, spleen and so on. We show that the 3D shape of the liver can be reconstructed by a few coefficients of the SPHARM.
