Surface registration between cortical surfaces is crucial in medical imaging for performing systematic comparisons between brains. Landmark-matching registration that matches anatomical features, called the sulcal landmarks, is often required to obtain a meaningful 1-1 correspondence between brain surfaces. This is commonly done by parameterizing the surface onto a simple parameter domain, such as the unit sphere, in which the sulcal landmarks are consistently aligned. Landmark matching surface registration can then be obtained from the landmark aligned parameterizations. For genus-0 closed brain surfaces, the optimized spherical harmonic parameterization, which aligns landmarks to consistent locations on the sphere, has been widely used. This approach is limited by the loss of bijectivity under large deformations and the slow computation. In this paper, we propose FLASH, a fast algorithm to compute the optimized spherical harmonic parameterization with consistent landmark alignment. This is achieved by formulating the optimization problem to ℂ and thereby linearizing the problem. Errors introduced near the pole are corrected using quasiconformal theories. Also, by adjusting the Beltrami differential of the mapping, a diffeomorphic (1-1, onto) spherical parameterization can be effectively obtained. The proposed algorithm has been tested on 38 human brain surfaces. Experimental results demonstrate that the computation of the landmark aligned spherical harmonic parameterization is significantly accelerated using the proposed algorithm.

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Starting with a commutative ring $R$ and an ideal $I$ , it is possible to define a family of rings $R(I)_{a,b}$ , with $a,b \in R$ , as quotients of the Rees algebra $\oplus_{n \geq0} I^{n}t^{n}$ ; among the rings appearing in this family we find Nagata’s idealization and amalgamated duplication. Many properties of these rings depend only on $R$ and $I$ and not on $a$ , $b$ ; in this paper we show that the Gorenstein and the almost Gorenstein properties are independent of $a$ , $b$ . More precisely, we characterize when the rings in the family are Gorenstein, complete intersection, or almost Gorenstein and we find a formula for the type.

We consider singular integral operators of the form (a)$Z$_{1}L^{−1}Z_{2}, (b)$Z$_{1}Z_{2}L^{−1}, and (c)$L$^{−1}Z_{1}Z_{2}, where$Z$_{1}and$Z$_{2}are nonzero right-invariant vector fields, and$L$is the$L$^{2}-closure of a canonical Laplacian. The operators (a) are shown to be bounded on$L$^{p}for all$p$∈(1, ∞) and of weak type (1, 1), whereas all of the operators in (b) and (c) are not of weak type ($p, p$) for any$p$∈[1, ∞).