Objective quantification of the motion of soft tissues in the orbit

Orbital soft-tissue motion analysis aids in the localization and diagnosis of orbital disorders. A technique has been developed to objectively quantify and visualize motion in the orbit during gaze. T1-weighted MR volume sequences are acquired during gaze and soft-tissue motion is quantified using optical flow techniques. The flow field is visualized using color-coding: orientation of the flow vector is coded by hue and magnitude by saturation of the pixel. Current clinical circumstances limit MR image acquisition to short sequences and short acquisition times. The effect of these limitations on the performance of optical flow computation has been studied for four representative optical flow algorithms: on short (nine frames) and long (21 frames) simulated sequences of rotation of a magnetic resonance (MR) imaged object, on short measured MR sequences of controlled rotation of the same object and on short MR sequences of motion in the orbit. On the short simulated and motion-controlled sequences, the Lucas and Kanade algorithm showed the best performance with respect to both accuracy and robustness. These motion estimates were accurate to within 20%. Motion in the orbit ranged between 0.05 and 0.25 mm/degree gaze. Color-coding was found to be attractive as a visualization technique, because it shows both magnitude and orientation of all flow vectors without cluttering.