AUTOMATIC ENHANCEMENT, ANIMATION, AND SEGMENTATION OF FLOW IN PERIPHERAL ARTERIES FROM MR PHASE-SHIFT VELOCITY MAPPING

The authors describe a technique for automatic enhancement, segmentation, and analysis of flow from MR phase shift velocity mapping. This method uses a specific flow related enhancement process to extract and localize the flow field within the image, followed by global flow analysis. By animation on low cost equipment (personal computers), this method can provide various ways of visualizing flow in vivo and its variation in different structures and lesions. Our preliminary results using this method for analyzing flow data in the aortic bifurcation of healthy volunteers are encouraging.