Abstract
Background: Muscle fascicle pennation angle (PA) is an important parameter related to musculoskeletal functions, and ultrasound imaging has been widely used for measuring PA, but manually and frame by frame in most cases. We have earlier reported an automatic method to estimate aponeurosis orientation based on Gabor transform and Revoting Hough Transform (RVHT).
Methods: In this paper, we proposed a method to estimate the overall orientation of muscle fascicles in a region of interest, in order to complete computing the orientation of the other side of the pennation angle, but the side found by RVHT. The measurements for orientations of both fascicles and aponeurosis were conducted in each frame of ultrasound images, and then the dynamic change of pennation angle during muscle contraction was obtained automatically. The method for fascicle orientation estimation was evaluated using synthetic images with different noise levels and later on 500 ultrasound images of human gastrocnemius muscles during isometric plantarflexion.
Results: The muscle fascicle orientations were also estimated manually by two operators. From the results it's found that the proposed automatic method demonstrated a comparable performance to the manual method.
Conclusions: With the proposed methods, ultrasound measurement for muscle pennation angles can be more widely used for functional assessment of muscles.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 63 |
| Journal | BioMedical Engineering Online |
| Volume | 11 |
| Online published | 3 Sept 2012 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2012 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
The project is supported partially by the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Commission (GHP/047/09), the National 863 Program of China (2012AA02A604), the National 973 Program of China (2010CB732606), the next generation communication technology Major project of National S&T (2013ZX03005013), the ‘Low-cost Healthcare’ Programs of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangdong Innovation Research Team Fund for Low-cost Healthcare Technologies (GIRTF-LCHT), the Guangdong Innovative Research Team Program (2011S013), International Science and Technology Cooperation Program of Guangdong Province (2012B050200004) and the Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Low-cost Healthcare (CXB201005260056A).
Research Keywords
- Electromyography
- EMG
- Gastrocnemius muscle
- Hough transform
- Orientation
- Pennation angle
- SMG
- Sonomyography
- Ultrasound image
Publisher's Copyright Statement
- This full text is made available under CC-BY 2.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/