Deformation similarity measurement in quasi-conformal shape space

•A novel framework for analysis and characterization of shape deformation.•A novel quasi-conformal metric to classify the deformations in shape space.•Classification of the left ventricle deformation in myopathic patients.

This paper presents a novel approach based on the shape space concept to classify deformations of 3D models. A new quasi-conformal metric is introduced which measures the curvature changes at each vertex of each pose during the deformation. The shapes with similar deformation patterns follow a similar deformation curve in shape space. Energy functional of the deformation curve is minimized to calculate the geodesic curve connecting two shapes on the shape space manifold. The geodesic distance illustrates the similarity between two shapes, which is used to compute the similarity between the deformations. We applied our method to classify the left ventricle deformations of myopathic and control subjects, and the sensitivity and specificity of our method were 88.8% and 85.7%, which are higher than other methods based on the left ventricle cavity, which shows our method can quantify the similarity and disparity of the left ventricle motion well.

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