Statistical Shape Models in the Focus: New Start-up Shapemeans

Three members of the SICAS network have founded the start-up company SHAPEMEANS GmbH: Ghazi Bouabene, Thomas Gerig and Marcel Lüthi of the Graphics and Vision research group at the University of Basel. The new company is offering the following services: building & validating statistical shape models from new data, custom research & development for medical image analysis and consulting & support in statistical shape modeling.

The research focus of the three co-founders is on methods to build statistical shape models of different anatomies and their use for medical image analysis. They are also actively involved in the development of the open source software solutions Statismo and Scalismo for statistical shape modeling.

Statismo has its roots in the research of the NCCR Co-Me (2001-2013). It is an opensource framework for statistical shape modeling written in C++. Statismo supports all shape modeling tasks, from model building to shape analysis. It is designed to seamlessly work together with common Open Source imaging frameworks such as ITK and VTK. Statismo is distributed under the BSD Licence which permits unrestricted use for commercial purposes.

Scalismo is an opensource framework for shape modeling and image analysis based on the same theoretical principles as Statismo. It runs on the Java Virtual Machine and leverages modern programming concepts. It is ideally suited to develop full-scale industrial applications that are deployable in complex, distributed imaging pipelines.