Résumé
In perennial crops, inner wood degradation by pathogens often escapes detection until irreversible damage has occurred. Grapevine trunk diseases (GTDs) are a well-known example in viticulture that alter plants from within, years before foliar symptoms arise, making early assessment difficult. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel non-destructive 3D + t pipeline for high-resolution Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) spatial quantification and monitoring of early internal host tissue degradation resulting from fungal pathogen colonization. The pipeline integrates spatiotemporal anatomical alignment and rigid registration; a generalized cylindricalcoordinate transformation; supervised segmentation of water-depleted regions; and population-level statistical analyses, including population mean images, probabilistic atlases, and 3D lesion descriptors. Applied to multiple Vitis vinifera cultivars inoculated with a fungal wood pathogen, our approach enables in vivo time-lapse comparisons between cultivars and treatments. The results reveal reproducible early degradation signals across individuals and cultivar-dependent differences in lesion progression. Overall, this methodological innovation provides a new paradigm for internal plant phenotyping, enabling non-invasive quantification of disease development and comparative spatiotemporal assessment of host responses in woody plants, with strong potential to advance early diagnosis and management of GTDs and internal diseases.