3D Bending of Surfaces and Volumes with an Application to Brain Torque Modeling

In this work, we propose a novel space deformation model for local bending of 3D volumes and surfaces. The model can be easily controlled through accommodation of a few intuitive parameters. Experiments on volumes, parametric surfaces, and polygonal surfaces show that our method has increased modeling capabilities when compared to the previous space deformation methods for local bending. We apply this new, more flexible model for space bending to model human brain asymmetry. In particular, we develop an image processing pipeline for automatic generation of a set of realistic 3D brain magnetic resonance (MR) images for which the asymmetry is known. This dataset can be used for the quantitative validation of voxel and surface based methods for studying brain shape asymmetry. The pipeline encompasses a realistic modeling of the anatomical rightward bending of the inter-hemispheric fissure in human brain.