Lateral Ventricle Shape Modeling using Peripheral Area Projection for Longitudinal Analysis

The deformation of the lateral ventricle (LV) shape is widely studied to identify specific morphometric changes associated with diseases. Since LV enlargement is considered a relative change due to brain atrophy, local longitudinal LV deformation can indicate deformation in adjacent brain areas. However, conventional methods for LV shape analysis focus on modeling the solely segmented LV mask. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning-based approach using peripheral area projection, which is the first attempt to analyze LV considering its surrounding areas. Our approach matches the baseline LV mesh by deforming the shape of follow-up LVs, while optimizing the corresponding points of the same adjacent brain area between the baseline and follow-up LVs. Furthermore, we quantitatively evaluated the deformation of the left LV in normal (n=10) and demented subjects (n=10), and we found that each surrounding area (thalamus, caudate, hippocampus, amygdala, and right LV) projected onto the surface of LV shows noticeable differences between normal and demented subjects.