Towards Deformable Shape Modeling of the Left Atrium Using Non-Rigid Coherent Point Drift Registration

Modeling the deformable shape of the left atrium is of strong interest for many applications in cardiac diagnosis and intervention. In this paper, we propose a method for left atrium shape modeling using non-rigid point cloud registration. In particular, we build upon the concept of Coherent Point Drift (CPD) registration that considers the alignment as a probability density estimation problem. Based on the set of non-rigidly registered point clouds, we perform a principle component analysis to establish a deformable shape model. In an experimental study on ten clinical data sets, we evaluated the registration accuracy in terms of average mesh-to-mesh distance, as well as on anatomical landmarks on the left atrium. With the proposed method, we achieved registration results with an average mesh-to-mesh error of 3.4 mm. The average landmark offset was 8.5 mm.