Automated assessment of small bowel motility function based on simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC)

In this paper, we propose an automated method for assessment of small bowel contraction movement based on the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) with cine-MRI. In our proposed method, the small bowel in each frame is considered as a super-pixel and is first segmented by the use of SLIC. SLIC performs a local clustering of pixels in a 3-D space defined by intensity and (x, y) coordinates. Then the dynamic area change of the segmented small bowel is used for quantitative analysis of the small bowel motility function. Compared with existing methods, our proposed method can achieve better results.