Quantitative Assessment of the Small Bowel Motility with Negative Mutual Information in Cine-MRI Sequences

Cine-MRI provides a well tolerated non-invasive method for the quantitative assessment of small bowel motility. The quantitative assessment of the small bowel motility reveals important information for the functional analysis of the small bowel. Traditionally the quantitative assessment is accomplished by detecting the peristaltic frequency of a specific small bowel segment within MRI sequences. Negative mutual information is proposed to assess the small bowel motility. A simulation of the small bowel motility is implemented, which proves that the proposed method can be utilized for the quantitative assessment. Experimental results demonstrate the accuracy of proposed method.