Using optical flow to analyze the motion of human body organs from bioimages

It is evident that human body organs movement analysis requires the study of the dynamic evolution of an image sequence (2D or 3D), i.e. the analysis of a data flow versus time. In particular, the proposed approach is based on the computation of the “optical flow”, from two-dimensional and three-dimensional image sequences. This technique is applied to time sequences of magnetic resonance images to study knee joint biomechanics and heart wall motion. Several issues are discussed, related both to the computation of the optical flow field on 3D image sequences, and also concerning the relevance of the flow measurement for clinical diagnosis of pathologies. Moreover, the measurement of motion-related parameters, facilitates the planning for surgical intervention. Experiments performed on real data acquired from healthy patients and patients with heart and knee ligament pathologies are presented