Docteur de l'université Automatic Segmentation and Shape Analysis ...

Chapter 2
Literature Review
In this chapter, a brief survey of the state-of-the-art in the field of hippocampal
segmentation and measurements of hippocampal atrophy in terms of its volume
and shape are presented. We first briefly review the methods used in the literature
for the segmentation of hippocampus on magnetic resonance (MR) images, with
emphasis on the atlas based methods. Then the development of shape analysis and
methods in shape modeling are surveyed. Thirdly, the measurement of hippocam-
pal atrophy by volumetry and the application of shape analysis are discussed.
Finally, we propose the approach we adopt in this thesis.
2.1 Segmentation of hippocampus in MR images
In medical imaging, the goal of segmentation is to assign meaningful labels to
the voxels in the image, such that the regions of different structural or functional
units are classified and may provide interpretable results. It is a crucial step in the
medical image analysis pipeline. The quality of segmentation directly affects the
effect of visualization, the accuracy in the subsequent analysis, and the planning of
intervention. Separating white matter, gray matter and CSF, parcellating cortical
areas, labeling neuroanatomical nuclei, and detecting boundaries of lesions such
as tumours are common examples of segmentation in neuroimaging.
17