System and method for estimating an indicator of the tissue activity of an organ

An imaging analysis system comprising a processing unit, an output human-machine interface, an imaging device using nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, and an interface for communicating with the imaging device and storage media, wherein:

• the imaging device arranged to emit high-frequency electromagnetic waves on a part of the body of the patient including an organ and measure a signal re-emitted by atoms of the organ to acquire a plurality of digital image sequences of the organ;
• the communication interface is arranged to receive from the imaging device experimental data S(b) of an elementary volume of an organ, said experimental data S(b) acquired from the plurality of digital image sequences of the organ;
• and
• the storage media contains instructions, the interpretation or execution of which by said processing unit causes the processing unit to:
• generate a quantified biomarker of an elementary volume, called “voxel”, of an organ of a human or animal patient, hereinafter denoted “tissue activity indicator” or TAI, over a delimited interval bmin to bmax of values of an acquisition parameter b corresponding to the intensity of the diffusion gradient, the calculation TAI=∫bminbmaxL(b)−ΓS[S(b)] db, L(b) being a function of said acquisition parameter b and ΓS[S(b)] a bijective transformation of said experimental data S(b);
• generate an output image including a parametric map of pixels, the output image encoding the value of said biomarker TAI for the voxel on the basis of a color gradient to express high tissue activity;
• and
• triggering an output of said biomarker TAI to the output human-machine interface, wherein the output of said biomarker TAI confirms a diagnosis.

A method for quantifying a biomarker of an organ of a human or animal patient, the method comprising:

• receiving, by a processing unit of a diffusion MRI imaging analysis system, experimental data as a plurality of digital image sequences obtained by an imaging device of the diffusion MRI imaging analysis system using nuclear magnetic resonance imaging;
• iteratively, for each voxel of a plurality of voxels within the plurality of digital image sequences:
• determining a measure of diffusion of water molecules for each voxel of a digital image sequence based on determining a difference between areas under two different curves in a an image, a first curve representing an arbitrary function of a diffusion gradient based on experimental data, and a second curve representing a bijective function, applied to a diffusion signal measured at different values of an acquisition parameter b in each of the digital images of the digital image sequence without noise reduction, wherein the diffusion signal is defined over a delimited interval;
• generating a tissue activity indicator based on the measure of diffusion of water molecules for the voxel of the digital image sequence by combining the measure of diffusion of water molecules corresponding in each of the digital images;
• and
• generating an output image of the MRI imaging analysis system, the output image including a parametric map of pixels encoding the tissue activity indicator for each of the plurality of voxels, wherein the tissue activity indicator expresses the pixels describing a high tissue activity of the organ of a human or animal patient.