ImplicitAtlas: Learning Deformable Shape Templates in Medical Imaging

Deep implicit shape models have become popular in the computer vision community at large but less so for biomed-ical applications. This is in part because large training databases do not exist and in part because biomedical an-notations are often noisy. In this paper, we show that by introducing templates within the deep learning pipeline we can overcome these problems. The proposed framework, named ImplicitAtlas, represents a shape as a deformation field from a learned template field, where multiple templates could be integrated to improve the shape representation ca-pacity at negligible computational cost. Extensive experi-ments on three medical shape datasets prove the superiority over current implicit representation methods.