Quantifying In-Vivo Arterial Deformation from CT and MRI: A Systematic Review of Segmentation, Motion Tracking, and Kinematic Metrics

This project is an ongoing systematic review of methods for quantifying three-dimensional, time-resolved (3D+t) deformation and motion of human arteries using computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We are interested in going beyond static descriptors such as vessel diameter to capture the dynamic mechanical behaviour of the arterial wall, which is strongly influenced by ageing, hypertension, genetic factors, and disease. Our goal is to map and critically appraise the current landscape of CT and MRI techniques that extract dynamic biomechanical metrics, and to clarify how these metrics relate to vascular ageing and pathology. We are conducting the review in accordance with PRISMA 2020 guidelines. Our search strategy covers Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar (search date: December 19, 2025), without a lower date limit. We are including peer-reviewed, patient-specific, in vivo CT or MRI studies that explicitly quantify arterial deformation or motion tracking in large human arteries, and excluding work focused on non-vascular tissues, purely experimental or in vitro setups, purely computational models, drug effects, or haemodynamics without wall deformation. After de-duplication and screening, we are selecting eligible full texts and extracting data on imaging protocols, segmentation approaches, temporal tracking methods, and reported biomechanical metrics. Methodologically, we are organizing the review around three core components of the imaging pipeline: (1) segmentation, ranging from manual and semi-automatic workflows in commercial/open-source software to more recent convolutional neural network (CNN) approaches; (2) temporal 3D motion tracking methods used; (3) biomechanical outputs, such as displacements and strains, geometric descriptors and derived stiffness indices. We expect the main outcomes of this work to be: (i) a systematic catalogue of CT and MRI pipelines for segmentation and 3D+t motion tracking of large human arteries; (ii) a structured overview of the biomechanical metrics currently reported; (iii) an integrated synthesis of dynamic findings across studies, highlighting consistent patterns such as age-related stiffening, spatially heterogeneous deformation, and differences between healthy and diseased vessels.