Sparse Principal Component Analysis in Medical Shape Modeling



AbstractPrincipal component analysis (PCA) is a widely used tool in medical image analysis for data reduction, model building, and data understanding and exploration. While PCA is a holistic approach where each new variable is a linear combination of all original variables, sparse PCA (SPCA) aims at producing easily interpreted models through sparse loadings, i.e. each new
variable is a linear combination of a subset of the original variables. One of the aims of using SPCA is the possible separation of the results into isolated and easily identifiable effects.
This article introduces SPCA for shape analysis in medicine. Results for three different data sets are given in relation to standard PCA and sparse PCA by simple thresholding of sufficiently small loadings. Focus is on a recent algorithm for computing sparse principal components, but a review of other approaches is supplied as well. The SPCA algorithm has been implemented using Matlab and is available for download.
The general behavior of the algorithm is investigated, and strengths and weaknesses are discussed. The original report on the SPCA algorithm argues that the ordering of modes is not an issue. We disagree on this point and propose several approaches to establish sensible orderings. A method that orders modes by decreasing variance and maximizes the sum of variances for all modes is presented and investigated in detail.
KeywordsSparse Principal Component Analysis, PCA, Evaluation of Principal Components, Shape Modeling, Corpus Callosum
TypeConference paper [With referee]
ConferenceInternational Symposium on Medical Imaging 2006, San Diego, CA, USA
Year2006    Month February    Vol. 6144
PublisherThe International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE)
Electronic version(s)[pdf]
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Image Analysis & Computer Graphics