MFCA-2008 is a satellite workshop of MICCAI 2008 which is devoted to statistical and geometrical aspects of the modeling of the variability of biological shapes. It will be held in New-York on September 6, in conjunction with MICCAI 2008. The goal is to foster the interactions between the mathematical community around shapes and the MICCAI community around computational anatomy applications. The workshop aims at being a forum for the exchange of the theoretical ideas and a source of inspiration for new methodological developments in computational anatomy.

Scope of the workshop

The goal of computational anatomy is to analyze and to statistically model the anatomy of organs in different subjects. Computational anatomic methods are generally based on the extraction of anatomical features or manifolds which are then statistically analyzed, often through a non-linear registration. There are nowadays a growing number of methods that can faithfully deal with the underlying biomechanical behavior of intra-subject deformations. However, it is more difficult to relate the anatomies of different subjects. In the absence of any justified physical model, diffeomorphisms provide the most general mathematical framework that enforce topological consistency. However, working with this infinite dimensional space raises some deep computational and mathematical problems, in particular for doing statistics. Likewise, modeling the variability of surfaces leads to rely on shape spaces that are much more complex than for curves. To cope with these, different methodological and computational frameworks have been proposed (e.g. smooth left-invariant metrics, focus on well-behaved subspaces of diffeomorphisms, modeling surfaces using courants, etc.) The goal of the workshop is to foster interactions between researchers investigating the combination of geometry and statistics in non-linear image and surface registration in the context of computational anatomy from different points of view. A special emphasis will be put on theoretical developments, applications and results being welcomed as illustrations.

Topics

Contributions were solicited in (but not limited to) the following areas:

• Riemannian and group theoretical methodds
• Geometric measurements of the anatomy
• Advanced statistics on deformations and shapes
• Metrics for computational anatomy
• Statistics of surfaces

Chairs

• Xavier Pennec (INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France)
• Sarang Joshi (SCI, University of Utah, USA)

Program committee

• Rachid Deriche (INRIA, France)
• Ian L. Dryden (University of Nottingham, UK)
• Tom Fletcher (University of Utah, USA)
• James Gee (Univ. of Pennsylvania, USA)
• Guido Gerig (University of Utah, USA)
• Polina Golland (CSAIL, MIT, USA)
• Stephen Marsland (Massey University, New-Zeeland)
• Michael I. Miller (John Hopkins University, USA)
• Mads Nielsen (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
• Salvador Olmos (University of Saragossa, Spain)
• Bruno Pelletier (University Montpellier, France)
• Jerry Prince (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
• Anand Rangarajan (University of Florida, USA)
• Daniel Rueckert (Imperial College London, UK
• Guillermo Sapiro (University of Minnesota, USA)
• Martin Styner (UNC Chapel Hill, USA)
• Anuj Srivastava (Florida State University, USA)
• Paul Thompson (University of California Los-Angeles, USA)
• Alain Trouvé (ENS-Cachan, France)
• Carole Twinning (University of Manchester, UK)
• William M. Wells III (CSAIL, MIT, and B&W Hospital, Boston, USA)

Previous workshop edition (MFCA'06): http://www.inria.fr/sophia/asclepios/events/MFCA06/