Recovery of Soft Tissue Deformation from 3D Medical Images Using Biomechanical Models

J. Duncan, O. Skrinjar and X. Papademetris

In this talk, we will describe the use of biomechanical models for the estimation of non-rigid displacement fields from sequences of three-dimensional medical images. Furthermore, we will present work in two key areas, namely

1) the estimation of brain shift for neurosurgery and

2) the estimation of left ventricular deformation.

In this work, the proper modeling of the underlying tissue is important in order to ensure reliable and robust estimation of the underlying displacement and consequently the deformation. Modeling is needed as the initial image-derived displacement estimates generated from a number of methods are sparse, noise-corrupted, often contain only partial information and sometimes contain only one certain component of the displacement. We will discuss the selection of an appropriate model and an appropriate modeling framework for each of these problems, which will then permit the estimation of complete and smooth displacement fields.