Tracking Muscle Tissue Displacement During Plantarflexion Excursion Using Non-Linear Deformation of Magnitude MR Images.

Usha Sinha¹, Alec Biccum¹, Shantanu Sinha²

The study focuses on the application of a non-linear warping algorithm based on optical flow to recover muscle tissue displacements from dynamic magnitude MR images. These were acquired on a 1.5-T GE scanner with a gated VE-PC imaging sequence while the subject exerted periodic ankle plantarflexion excursions. Tissue displacements were extracted from the magnitude images by warping the reference (first) image to images acquired at other phases. The deformation vectors recovered by the algorithm are visualized on a 2D grid; the grid deformation agreed with anticipated tissue displacements. The study shows the potential for deformations to be recovered directly from magnitude images.