Surface-Base Approach Using a Multi-scale EM-ICP Registration for Statistical Population Analysis

The human cortex is a folded ribbon of neurons with a high inter-individual variability. It is a challenging structure to study especially when measuring small changes resulting from normal aging and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer´s Disease (AD). Recent studies have proposed surface based approaches for statistical population comparison of cortical changes since such approaches better cope with the surfacic nature of the cortex. In this paper we present a new multi-scale EM-ICP registration that is embedded into a surface-based approach. We compare this new registration algorithm with the shape context in the context of statistical population analysis. When comparing the cortical thickness between healthy elderly subjects to Alzheimer´s disease patients, the new pipeline reduces the intra class variability while increasing the statistical power of the T-tests between both groups.