Computational anatomy (CA) is the study of shape and form in
medical imaging
Medical imaging is the technique and process of imaging the interior of a body for clinical analysis and medical intervention, as well as visual representation of the function of some organs or tissues (physiology). Medical imaging seeks to rev ...
. The study of deformable shapes in
computational anatomy rely on high-dimensional diffeomorphism groups
which generate orbits of the form
. In CA, this orbit is in general considered a smooth
Riemannian manifold
In differential geometry, a Riemannian manifold or Riemannian space , so called after the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann, is a real manifold, real, smooth manifold ''M'' equipped with a positive-definite Inner product space, inner product ...
since at every point of the manifold
there is an
inner product inducing the norm
on the
tangent space
that varies smoothly from point to point in the manifold of shapes
. This is generated by viewing the
group of diffeomorphisms
as a Riemannian manifold with
, associated to the tangent space at
. This induces the norm and metric on the orbit
under the action from the group of diffeomorphisms.
The diffeomorphisms group generated as Lagrangian and Eulerian flows
The diffeomorphisms in
computational anatomy are generated to satisfy the
Lagrangian and Eulerian specification of the flow fields,
, generated via the ordinary differential equation
with the Eulerian vector fields
in
for