Registration and retrieval of elongated structures in medical images

This work aims at proposing a set of methods to describe, register and retrieve images of elongated structures from a database based on their shape content. We propose a registration algorithm that jointly takes into account the gross shape of the structure and the shape of its boundary, resulting in anatomically consistent deformations. The method determines a medial axis that represents the full extent of the structure with no branches. Registration follows the linear elasticity model and is implemented through dynamic programming. Discriminative anatomic features are computed from the results of registration and used as variables in a content-based image retrieval system. A case study on the morphology of the corpus callosum in the chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome illustrates the effectiveness of the method and corroborates the hypothesis that retrieval systems may also act as knowledge discovery tools.