摘要

Quantitative image analysis is a tool that is used to extract feature values from images in an unbiased and reproducible fashion. In the past few years, there has been more and more interest in analyzing events where some motion has occurred; the techniques developed to analyze static scenes become only one component of what is necessary to analyze time varying imagery.
A large class of problems that provide a wealth of imagery for motion analysis are transport phenomena. Specifically, transport problems in biology and medicine possess unique characteristics in two respects. First, they are a class of problems that provide interesting applications and secondly, they are challenging motion problems that will require new theoretical developments. Many of the problems in these two classes do not involve simply motions of rigid objects, but are natural examples of non-rigid motions.
In this paper, the problem of analyzing non-rigid motion in a natural transport problem is considered. First, an overview of methods for analyzing rigid and non-rigid motion are given. Secondly, a description of the problem of nerve regeneration and modeling neurite growth is given. Third, an outline of the steps involved in processing the image sequence and computing the motion is given. This is meant to serve as a possible paradigm for modeling multiple non-rigid motions in a time sequence. Lastly, some concluding remarks are given.