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

This keynote address reviews several techniques from morphometrics (the multivariate biometrics of shape) developed mainly in the context of medical image analysis over the last decade. The new techniques provide powerful tools for geometric tasks that arise in the course of most analyses of medical images in groups. These tasks include standardizing against Euclidean similarity transformations or shear transformations, encoding informative prior knowledge about shape variation, and detecting, testing, and visualizing linear statistical patterns of variation within or between groups. The author reviews the features of the present toolkit, the standard underlying data models entailed and some of the extensions that reach out to the additional information content of medical images for common clinical or scientific applications