Morphological variations in the left atrial appendage (LAA) are associated with different levels of ischemic stroke risk for patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). Studying LAA morphology can elucidate mechanisms behind this association and lead to the development of advanced stroke risk stratification tools. However, current categorical descriptions of LAA morphologies are qualitative and inconsistent across studies, which impedes advancements in our understanding of stroke pathogenesis in AF. To mitigate these issues, we introduce a quantitative pipeline that combines elastic shape analysis with unsupervised learning for the categorization of LAA morphology in AF patients. As part of our pipeline, we compute pairwise elastic distances between LAA meshes from a cohort of 20 AF patients, and leverage these distances to cluster our shape data. We demonstrate that our method clusters LAA morphologies based on distinctive shape features, overcoming the innate inconsistencies of current LAA categorization systems, and paving the way for improved stroke risk metrics using objective LAA shape groups.
Keywords: atrial fibrillation; computational anatomy; elastic shape analysis; ischemic stroke; left atrial appendage.