Landmark-Based Shape Analysis on Middle Cerebral Intracranial Aneurysms: A Geometric Morphometrics Approach to Infer Natural History.

Background: Due to the scarcity of longitudinal data, the morphologic development of intracranial aneurysms (IAs) during their natural history remains poorly understood. However, longitudinal information can often be inferred from cross-sectional datasets as demonstrated by anatomists' use of geometric morphometrics to build evolutionary trees, reconstructing species inter-relationships based on morphologic landmarks.

Objective: We adopted these tools to analyze cross-sectional image data and infer relationships between IA morphologies.