A diffeomorphic matching based characterization of the pelvic organ dynamics

Abstract

The analysis of the behavior of the pelvic organs on dynamic mri sequences could help to a better understanding of pelvic floor pathophysiology. The main pelvic organs (bladder, uterus-vagina, rectum) are soft-tissue organs, they undergo deformations and displacements under an abdominal strain. Moreover, the inter-patient morphological variabilities of these organs are very important. In this paper, we present a methodology for the analysis of the pelvic organ dynamics based on a diffeormorphic matching method called large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping. It allows to define a unique contour parametrization of the pelvic organs, and to estimate the organ deformations after matching the organ shape against its initial state ( ). Some promising results are presented, where the pathology detection capability of the deformation features is analyzed through an inter-patient analysis. Also, an organ parcellation is proposed by performing a local deformation analysis. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.