Functional Kinematic Assessment of the Wrist Using Volumetric Dynamic MRI

Motivation: Dynamic imaging can be useful for the evaluation of wrist instability. Goal(s): To propose a semi-automatic approach for carpal bones segmentation on 3D dynamic wrist MRI to enable kinematic assessment. Approach: We segmented carpal bones on a high-resolution 3D static MRI, registered it to a template created from the dynamic frames, and transferred back the segmentations onto individual 3D dynamic volumes. Bones surfaces were reconstructed and the reproducibility of motion patterns was assessed on repeated scans. Results: Our proposed image processing and visualization pipeline enables semi-automatic segmentation of carpal bones and provides a framework for qualitative and quantitative analysis of wrist kinematics. Impact: This work demonstrates semi-automatic segmentation of real-time dynamic MRI of the wrist to extract carpal bones motion. It could be used for quantitative kinematic analysis to detect and characterize wrist abnormalities.