Extreme leg motion analysis of professional ballet dancers via MRI segmentation of multiple leg postures

摘要

Purpose Professional ballet dancers are subject to constant extreme motion which is known to be at the origin of many articular disorders. To analyze their extreme motion, we exploit a unique magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) protocol, denoted as ‘dual-posture’ MRI, which scans the subject in both the normal (supine) and extreme (split) postures. However, due to inhomogeneous tissue intensities and image artifacts in these scans, coupled with unique acquisition protocol (split posture), segmentation of these scans is difficult. We present a novel algorithm that exploits the correlation between scans (bone shape invariance, appearance similarity) in automatically segmenting the dancer MRI images.