Euclidean geodesic loops on high-genus surfaces applied to the morphometry of vestibular systems

This paper proposes a novel algorithm to extract feature landmarks on the vestibular system (VS), for the analysis of Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) disease. AIS is a 3-D spinal deformity commonly occurred in adolescent girls with unclear etiology. One popular hypothesis was suggested to be the structural changes in the VS that induce the disturbed balance perception, and further cause the spinal deformity. The morphometry of VS to study the geometric differences between the healthy and AIS groups is of utmost importance. However, the VS is a genus-3 structure situated in the inner ear. The high-genus topology of the surface poses great challenge for shape analysis. In this work, we present a new method to compute exact geodesic loops on the VS. The resultant geodesic loops are in Euclidean metric, thus characterizing the intrinsic geometric properties of the VS based on the real background geometry. This leads to more accurate results than existing methods, such as the hyperbolic Ricci flow method. Furthermore, our method is fully automatic and highly efficient, e.g., one order of magnitude faster than. We applied our algorithm to the VS of normal and AIS subjects. The promising experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our method and reveal more statistically significant shape difference in the VS between right-thoracic AIS and normal subjects.