Medial structure generation for registration of anatomical structures

Medial structures (skeletons and medial manifolds) have shown capacity to describe shape in a compact way. In the field of medical imaging, they have been employed to enrich the description of organ anatomy, to improve segmentation, or to describe the organ position in relation to surrounding structures. Methods for generation of medial structures, however, are prone to the generation of medial artifacts (spurious branches) that traditionally need to be pruned before the medial structure can be used for further computations. The act of pruning can affect main sections of the medial surface, hindering its performance as shape descriptor. In this work, we present a method for the computation of medial structures that generates smooth medial surfaces that do not need to be explicitly pruned. Additionally, we present a validation framework for medial surface evaluation. Finally, we apply this method to create a parametric model of the cochlea shape that yields better registration results between cochleae.