I’m proposing to add an extension that performs the Statistical shape analysis using the 3D Poisson equations.
The repository is at:
The paper is:
Gao Y, Bouix S. Statistical Shape Analysis using 3D Poisson Equation—A Quantitatively Validated Approach. Medical Image Analysis. 2016 Jan 15.
There is already SPHARM-PDM for shape analysis in the extension and adding this new one would provide another module to compare.
I’m hoping to add this through the extension management system and would like to hear about your suggestions/opinions.
There are a number of other shape analysis packages, besides SALT/spharm.
SlicerMorph extension has a Generalized Procrustes Analysis module for landmark-based analysis. And Auto3Dgm extension provides a fully automated way of finding correspondence 3D shapes that do not yield itself classical landmark-based analysis. The output of the auto3Dgm, which are dense points, can be read by our GPA module for interactive PCA decomposition and variance visualization.
So your extension will definitely strengthen the growing number of shape analysis tools within Slicer.
Thank you so much for your suggestion. Yes, one thing i found amazing about the field of statistical shape analysis when i started working on that guided by Sylvain Bouix back ten years ago was that, the researchers in this field tend to embrace the open source concept a lot. This was very helpful when we were performing the quantitative comparison/analysis among several widely used shape analysis algorithms. we open sourced the Poisson equation based algorithm when the algorithm was publish. However i think on Slicer’s platform, the algorithm should be much easier to be used than a piece of standalone software.
I don’t do shape analysis myself but we see a lot of questions here on the forum so I know there’s interest.