Efficient Similarity Retrieval for Temporal Shape Sequences: A Case Study using Cardiac MR Images

The spherical harmonics (SPHARM) approach has been used for the representation of shapes in many types of biomedical image data. We propose a SPHARM-based similarity comparison for shape sequences that allows fast similarity searches for dynamic objects and demonstrate it using 3D images of a beating heart. By using spherical harmonics to extract a small number of features that represent cardiac shape in each sequential state, we enable indexing and pruning of database entries with a multidimensional index tree (e.g. R*-tree) for fast retrieval. Our approach relies on obtaining selected landmarks to allow normalization within and between sequences. This framework is extensible to other application domains.