Graph matching survey for medical imaging: On the way to deep learning

The interest on graph matching has not stopped growing since the late seventies. The basic idea of graph matching consists of generating graph representations of different data or structures and compare those representations by searching correspondences between them. There are manifold techniques that have been developed to find those correspondences and the choice of one or another depends on the characteristics of the application of interest. These applications range from pattern recognition (e.g. biometric identification) to signal processing or artificial intelligence. One of the aspects that make graph matching so attractive is its ability to facilitate data analysis, and medical imaging is one of the fields that can benefit from this in a greater extent. The potential of graph matching to find similarities and differences between data acquired at different points in time shows its potential to improve diagnosis, follow-up of human diseases or any other of the clinical scenarios that require comparison between different datasets. In spite of the large amount of papers that were published in this field to the date there is no survey paper of graph matching for clinical applications. This survey aims to fill this gap.