Analysis of serial MR images of joints

Medical research and drug discovery rely increasingly on making comparisons between MR images from large numbers of subjects, often with multiple time points for each subject. We show how image registration and visualisation technique can be used for quantitative and qualitative assessment of changes over time in an experimental model of rheumatoid arthritis. We applied the technique to automatically delineate two separate bones (the calcaneus and talus) from the in vivo MR images of an ankle (6 subjects, 6 time points each) by propagating labels from pre-labelled "atlas" MRI scans. As an initial analysis, we calculated their volume and rendered their surfaces in 3D to study the disease progression over time. Finally, we investigated the use of grid computing by coupling it with image analysis and visualisation algorithms to enable remote invocation, parallel execution, and source data input from heterogeneous distributed image repositories.