Large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping

Large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping is like playing with playdough. Imagine you have two different shapes made out of playdough, like a ball and a cube. Now, you want to turn the ball into a cube. To do that, you have to squish and stretch it a lot.

In the same way, large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping takes two different images, like a picture of a dog and a picture of a cat, and uses math to squish and stretch them until they match up perfectly. This is called registration.

But why do we need to do this? Well, imagine you're a doctor and you want to compare brain scans of two different patients. The brain scans won't look exactly the same because everyone's brain is different. But using large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping, you can overlay one patient's scan on top of the other and compare them side by side.

This is really helpful because doctors can use this technique to see where the brain has changed over time or because of an illness. They can also use it to plan surgeries, like for brain tumors or epilepsy.

So, large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping is like playdough for pictures. It helps doctors compare different images by squishing and stretching them until they fit together perfectly.