Visualisation of shear from cine MRI: towards detection of gastrointestinal adhesions

Motivation: Imaging gastrointestinal obstructions and adhesions forms part of the 2024 Challenge on Unmet Clinical Needs. Goal(s): The goal is to investigate an analysis of tissue motion that may be able to distinguish adhering regions of tissue from normally-moving tissue. Approach: Time frames are non-rigidly registered giving a series of deformation fields. From these fields, a shear strain can be calculated at each pixel for each time frame. Summing over all the frames gives a single map of shear strain. Results: There is a visual correspondence between regions that are static, or move rigidly, and regions identified as having a low shear strain. Impact: Shear strain is presented as a color overlay over a cine gastrointestinal motility sequence. This visualisation may aid radiological detection of adhesions and subsequently direct more appropriate surgical intervention.