Down-sampling template curve to accelerate LDDMM-curve with application to shape analysis of the corpus callosum

Large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping for curve (LDDMM-curve) has been widely used in deformation based statistical shape analysis of the mid-sagittal corpus callosum. A main limitation of LDDMM-curve is that it is time-consuming and computationally complex. In this study, down-sampling strategies for accelerating LDDMM-curve are investigated and tested on two large datasets, one on Alzheimer's disease (155 Alzheimer's disease, 325 mild cognitive impairment and 185 healthy controls) and the other on first-episode schizophrenia (92 first-episode schizophrenia and 106 healthy controls). For both datasets a variety of down-sampling factors are tested in terms of registration accuracy, registration speed, and most importantly disease-related patterns. Experimental results revealed that down-sampling template curve by a factor of 2 can significantly reduce the running time of LDDMM-curve without sacrificing the registration accuracy. Also, the disease-induced patterns, or more specifically the group comparison results, were almost identical before and after down-sampling. It is also shown that there was no need to down-sample the target population curves but only the single template curve of the study of interest. Comprehensive analyses were conducted.