Automatic MRI Database Exploration and Applications

The design of representative models of the human body is of great interest to medical doctors. Qualitative information about the characteristics of the brain is widely available, but due to the volume of information that needs to be analyzed and the complexity of its structure, rarely is there quantiication according to a standard model. To address this problem, we propose in this paper an automatic method to retrieve corresponding structures from a database of medical images. This procedure being local and fast, will permit navigation through large databases in a practical amount of time. We present as examples of applications the building of an average volume of interest and preliminary results of classiication according to morphology.