MFCA is a satellite workshop of MICCAI devoted to statistical and geometrical methods for modeling the variability of biological shapes. 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.

Following the

• First MFCA workshop, held in Copenhagen (Denmark) in October 2006
• Second MFCA workshop, held in New-York (USA) in September 2008

the Third MFCA workshop will be held in Toronto on September 22, in conjunction with MICCAI 2011.

Rationale

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 currents, 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.

Workshop format and topics

The program will be composed of 8-10 oral presentations selected by the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants, and a poster session of about 10 to 20 papers. To foster interactions, a large amount of time will be reserved for discussions after each presentation. Contributions are solicited in (but not limited to) the areas of:

• Riemannian and group theoretical methods
• Geometrical measurements of the anatomy
• Advanced statistics on deformations and shapes
• Metrics for computational anatomy
• Statistics of surfaces
• Modeling of growth and longitudinal shape changes

Chairs

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

Program Committee

• Stéphanie Allassoniere (Ecole Polytechnique, FR)
• Rachid Deriche (INRIA, FR)
• Stanley Durrleman (SCI, Univ. Utah, USA)
• Ian L. Dryden (University of South Carolina, USA)
• Tom Fletcher (University of Utah, USA)
• James Gee (Univ. of Pennsylvania, USA)
• Guido Gerig (University of Utah, USA)
• Polina Golland (CSAIL, MIT, USA)
• Darryl Holm (Imperial College London, UK)
• Natasha Lepore (USC Keek School of Medicine, USA)
• Yoshitaka Masutani (University of Tokyo Hospital, JP)
• Stephen Marsland (Massey University, NZ)
• Michael I. Miller (John Hopkins University, USA)
• David Mumford (Brown university, USA)
• Marc Niethammer (UNC Chapel Hill, USA)
• Salvador Olmos (University of Saragossa, Spain)
• Sebastien Ourselin (UCL, UK)
• 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 (UCLA, Los-Angeles, USA)
• Alain Trouvé (ENS-Cachan, France)
• Carole Twining (University of Manchester, UK)
• Baba Vemuri (University of Florida, USA)
• Francois Xavier Vialard (Imp. Coll. London, UK)
• William M. Wells III (CSAIL, MIY, Boston, USA)
• Laurent Younes (John Hopkins University, USA)