Learning Deep Features for Shape Correspondence with Domain Invariance
This work addresses the challenge of automating shape correspondence in medical imaging, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods that rely on manual expertise.
The paper tackles the problem of establishing anatomical shape correspondence across populations by proposing an automated deep learning approach to extract features, which outperforms manual feature methods on datasets of human bones.
Correspondence-based shape models are key to various medical imaging applications that rely on a statistical analysis of anatomies. Such shape models are expected to represent consistent anatomical features across the population for population-specific shape statistics. Early approaches for correspondence placement rely on nearest neighbor search for simpler anatomies. Coordinate transformations for shape correspondence hold promise to address the increasing anatomical complexities. Nonetheless, due to the inherent shape-level geometric complexity and population-level shape variation, the coordinate-wise correspondence often does not translate to the anatomical correspondence. An alternative, group-wise approach for correspondence placement explicitly models the trade-off between geometric description and the population's statistical compactness. However, these models achieve limited success in resolving nonlinear shape correspondence. Recent works have addressed this limitation by adopting an application-specific notion of correspondence through lifting positional data to a higher dimensional feature space. However, they heavily rely on manual expertise to create domain-specific features and consistent landmarks. This paper proposes an automated feature learning approach, using deep convolutional neural networks to extract correspondence-friendly features from shape ensembles. Further, an unsupervised domain adaptation scheme is introduced to augment the pretrained geometric features with new anatomies. Results on anatomical datasets of human scapula, femur, and pelvis bones demonstrate that features learned in supervised fashion show improved performance for correspondence estimation compared to the manual features. Further, unsupervised learning is demonstrated to learn complex anatomy features using the supervised domain adaptation from features learned on simpler anatomy.