Statistical models of shape and spatial relation-application to hippocampus segmentation

This paper presents a new method based both on Active Shape Model (ASM) and spatial distance model to segment brain structures. It combines two types of a priori knowledge: the structure shapes and the distances between them. This knowledge consists of shape and distance variability which are estimated during a training step. Then, the obtained models are used to guide simultaneously the evolution of initial structure shapes towards the target contours. The proposed models are applied to extract two hippocampal regions on coronal MRI of the brain. The obtained results are encouraging and show the performance of the proposed model.