1. A method for providing automatic diagnosis and decision support in whole-body imaging, comprising: using whole-body imaging to obtain a first set of image data of a patient; detecting a plurality of anatomical landmarks in the first set of image data using a classification-based method; fitting a statistical whole-body atlas using the first set of image data and the plurality of anatomical landmarks, wherein the statistical whole-body atlas encodes anatomical or functional variations of the whole-body or body parts and includes statistics on global and local shape deformations, and statistics on joint articulations; and using the statistics in the statistical whole-body atlas to characterize pathological findings in terms of a diagnosis, wherein the statistical whole-body atlas comprises at least one of mathematical distributional appearance models or spatial relational models of organs or structures in one or more whole-body imaging modalities, wherein the mathematical distributional appearance models or spatial relational models are learned based on annotated training data.