  We present a unified statistical approach to modeling disconnected 3D
anatomical structures extracted from medical images. Due to image acquisition
and preprocessing noises, it is expected the imaging data is noisy. The surface
coordinates of the structures are regressed using the weighted linear
combination of Laplace-Beltrami (LB) eigenfunctions to smooth out noisy data
and perform statistical analysis. The method is applied in characterizing the
3D growth pattern of human hyoid bone between ages 0 and 20. We detected a
significant age effect on localized parts of the hyoid bone.
