Boundary and medial shape analysis of the hippocampus in schizophrenia

Statistical shape analysis has become of increasing interest to the neuroimaging community due to its potential to precisely locate morphological changes and thus potentially discriminate between healthy and pathological structures. This paper describes a combined boundary and medial shape analysis based on two different shape descriptions applied to a study of the hippocampus shape abnormalities in schizophrenia. The first shape description is the sampled boundary implied by the spherical harmonic SPHARM description. The second one is the medial shape description called M-rep. Both descriptions are sampled descriptions with inherent point correspondence. Their shape analysis is based on computing differences from an average template structure analyzed using standard group mean difference tests. The results of the global and local shape analysis in the presented hippocampus study exhibit the same patterns for the boundary and the medial analysis. The results strongly suggest that the normalized hippocampal shape of the schizophrenic group is different from the control group, most significantly as a deformation difference in the tail region.