Automatic quantitative assessment of the small bowel motility with cine-MRI sequence analysis

Abstract

The contour of small bowel segment is informative for the quantitative assessment of its motility. Contour detection requires initial contour for Level Set Method in every MR image of Cine-MRI sequences. Manual initialization is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task, which may hamper its clinical uses. We proposed to generate initial contour automatically for a whole Cine-MRI sequence, which only needs radiologist's interaction in the first MR image. Furthermore a moving benchmark line strategy is proposed to improve the accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect desired small bowel segment's contour correctly and outperform traditional methods in low contrast situation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.