Unified NDMI for small intestinal cine MRI: repeatability and sensitivity to multicenter variability.

purposeTo establish a comparability-first cine-MRI paradigm for small intestinal motility using a unified, feature-agnostic normalized differential motion index (NDMI). On this foundation, we investigated scan-rescan consistency and sensitivity under simulated multicenter variability across three methodological families - Optical flow, Morphology, and Implicit neural representation (INR).

methodsTwelve healthy volunteers underwent same-scanner scan-rescan cine-MRI. Nineteen high-confidence ROI subsequences were curated. Motility features were derived from (i) generalized Optical flow, (ii) JointSwinUNETR segmentation, and (iii) INR registration adapted to 2D series. A single NDMI parameterization was applied across methods and compared with expert three-level ordinal ratings (vigorous/moderate/low) using accuracy, weighted kappa (xw), and Spearman's ρ. Repeatability was assessed with Bland-Altman analysis. Robustness was probed via controlled perturbations (intensity scaling/bias, Gaussian noise, affine distortions), and variance contributions were estimated. Per-frame latency was recorded.

resultsAgreement with expert ratings was favorable across all families: INR achieved the highest overall accuracy and rank correlation (Acc[Formula: see text], highest ρ), Morphology yielded the strongest quadratic-weighted κ, and Optical flow was lower overall, particularly in the moderate class. Signed Bland-Altman analyses showed near-zero bias and the tightest limits of agreement for Morphology with the highest [Formula: see text], intermediate repeatability for INR, and wider limits for Optical flow. Under simulated multicenter perturbations, dominant variance sources diverged-noise plus isotropic scale for Optical flow, geometric distortions for Morphology, and Rician noise for INR-whereas global intensity shifts were negligible within the tested ranges. Mean per-frame latency was 0.03 s (Morphology), 0.07 s (Optical flow), and 5.66 s (INR).

conclusionNDMI provides a unified, feature-agnostic basis for fair cross-family comparison of intestinal motility. Under controlled conditions, all three methods were repeatable: Morphology was most consistent; INR showed the best agreement with expert ratings and relative robustness to affine changes; Optical flow was more sensitive to SNR and scale. These profiles support scenario-aware method selection and motivate prospective multicenter validation with protocol harmonization.