Matching 3-D Anatomical Surfaces with Non-Rigid Volumetric Deformations

This paper presents a new method for determining the minimal non-rigid deformation between two 3-D surfaces, such as those which describe anatomical structures in 3-D medical images. Although we match surfaces, we represent the deformation as a volumetric transformation. Our method performs a least squares minimization of the distance between the two surfaces of interest. To quickly and accurately compute distances between points on the two surfaces, we use a precomputed distance map represented using an octree spline whose resolution increases near the surface. To quickly and robustly compute the deformation, we use a volumetric spline to model the deformation function. We present experimental results on both synthetic and real 3-D surfaces.