Fig. 3. Illustration of the concept of the cloud and the virtual shape S_virtual used in the prediction stage.

The green vertices visible in the overlap between the baseline atlas and the virtual shape S_virtual were updated using better candidates from the cloud C. Notice that we have a good overlap between the baseline atlas shape and the baseline input shape S₀. Orange, blue and red vertices belong to the cloud where their learnt trajectories can be easily retrieved to track forth their spatiotemporal deformation. The blue rectangles represent the later timepoints where the spatiotemporal atlas was estimated.