Utilizing disease-specific organ shape components for disease discrimination: application to discrimination of...

We describe a method to capture disease-specific components in organ shapes. A statistical shape model, constructed by the principal component analysis (PCA) of organ shapes, is used to define the subspace representing inter-subject shape variability. The first PCA is applied to the datasets of healthy organ shapes to define the subspace of normal variability. Then, the datasets of diseased shapes are projected onto the orthogonal complement (OC) of the sub-space of normal variability, and the second PCA is applied to the projected datasets to derive the subspace representing the disease-specific variability. To calculate the OC of an n-dimensional subspace, a novel closed-form formulation is developed. Experiments were performed to show that the support vector machine classification in the OC subspace better discriminated healthy and diseased liver shapes using 99 CT data. The effects of the number of training data and the difference in segmentation methods on the classification accuracy were evaluated to clarify the characteristics of the proposed method.