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Geometric steerable medial maps

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Abstract

To provide more intuitive and easily interpretable representations of complex shapes/organs, medial manifolds should reach a compromise between simplicity in geometry and capability of restoring the anatomy/shape of the organ/volume. Existing morphological methods show excellent results when applied to 2D objects, but their quality drops across dimensions. This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds from a theoretical and a practical point of view. First, we introduce a continuous operator for accurate and efficient computation of medial structures of arbitrary dimension. Second, we present a validation protocol for assessing the suitability of medial surfaces for anatomical representation in medical applications. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches and show its higher performance for medical imaging applications in terms of medial simplicity and capability of reconstructing the anatomical volume.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Spanish projects TIN2009-13618, TIN2012-33116, CSD2007-00018 and the Generalitat de Catalunya project 2009-TEM-00007. Debora Gil has been supported by the Ramon y Cajal Program of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alma I.T. Systems, Barcelona, Spain

    Sergio Vera & Miguel Angel González Ballester

  2. Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Debora Gil & Agnés Borràs

  3. Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation, Children’s National Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA

    Marius George Linguraru

Authors
  1. Sergio Vera
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  2. Debora Gil
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  3. Agnés Borràs
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  4. Marius George Linguraru
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  5. Miguel Angel González Ballester
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Correspondence to Debora Gil.

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Vera, S., Gil, D., Borràs, A. et al. Geometric steerable medial maps. Machine Vision and Applications 24, 1255–1266 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-013-0490-4

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