Optical flow computation on bioimages: A tool to quantify heart wall motion on standard MRI sequences

Heart wall motion has been evaluated by MRI technique, computing point by point the velocity field data in a image series. The raw data have been directly processed for the edge detection step. A first derivative has been applied to the MR data series in the frequency domain to automatically enhance the edges related to the regions of interest. The optical flow has been evaluated by computing the image intensity gradient variation versus time. The optical flow allows a useful heart wall motion interpretation only if applied on appropriately edge enhanced images. The edge detection data processing in the frequency domain is simple and precise and can be easily implemented and automatically performed on a MRI system.