A novel 3D partitioned active shape model for segmentation of brain MR images.

A 3D Partitioned Active Shape Model (PASM) is proposed in this paper to address the problems of the 3D Active Shape Models (ASM). When training sets are small. It is usually the case in 3D segmentation, 3D ASMs tend to be restrictive. This is because the allowable region spanned by relatively few eigenvectors cannot capture the full range of shape variability. The 3D PASM overcomes this limitation by using a partitioned representation of the ASM. Given a Point Distribution Model (PDM), the mean mesh is partitioned into a group of small tiles. In order to constrain deformation of tiles, the statistical priors of tiles are estimated by applying Principal Component Analysis to each tile. To avoid the inconsistency of shapes between tiles, training samples are projected as curves in one hyperspace instead of point clouds in several hyperspaces. The deformed points are then fitted into the allowable region of the model by using a curve alignment scheme. The experiments on 3D human brain MRIs show that when the numbers of the training samples are limited, the 3D PASMs significantly improve the segmentation results as compared to 3D ASMs and 3D Hierarchical ASMs.