MR imaging opens the opportunity to image soft materials in the human body non-invasively and to observe the behavior of organs and muscles over a period of time. Here, a simple and easy-to-use method to track and measure the movement of the nasal walls during breathing is presented that uses a sum of three Gaussian functions as an estimator for the intensity distribution of the MR image. By postprocessing MR-data it is possible to quantify internal nasal movement in a non-invasive manner. The approach shows very good results in comparison to manual segmentation and with respect to stability. Deviations of 10% in the orientation of the ROI still lead to sub-pixel accuracy.

The ImageJ plugin is available as jar here.

The user manual is available as pdf here.

You can also find the Javadoc output here.

The source is available as zip here.

A detailed description is given in this paper. Please cite it when using alae tracker.

Breininger K, Maier A, Forman C, Flatz W, Messmer C, Schuster M. Alae Tracker: Tracking of the Nasal Walls in MR-Imaging. Bildverarbeitung fuer die Medizin, Springer 2014. pp. 336-341.