An efficient framework for estimation of muscle fiber orientation using ultrasonography

BioMedical Engineering OnLine

Shan Ling⁴  Bin Chen³  Yongjin Zhou²  Wan-Zhang Yang¹  Yu-Qian Zhao⁵  Lei Wang⁴  Yong-Ping Zheng² 

[1] Affiliated Nanshan Hospital of Guangdong Medical College, Shenzhen, China

[2] Interdisciplinary Division of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

[3] The Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Low-cost Healthcare, Shenzhen, China

[4] Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China

[5] School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha, China

关键词: Image segmentation;    Line detection;    Orientation;    Hough transform;    Muscle;    Ultrasound;   

Others  :  797332
DOI  :  10.1186/1475-925X-12-98

 received in 2013-07-18, accepted in 2013-09-26,  发布年份 2013

【 摘 要 】

Background

Muscle fiber orientation (MFO) is an important parameter related to musculoskeletal functions. The traditional manual method for MFO estimation in sonograms was labor-intensive. The automatic methods proposed in recent years also involved voting procedures which were computationally expensive.

Methods

In this paper, we proposed a new framework to efficiently estimate MFO in sonograms. We firstly employed Multi-scale Vessel Enhancement Filtering (MVEF) to enhance fascicles in the sonograms and then the enhanced images were binarized. Finally, line-shaped patterns in the binary map were detected one by one, according to their shape properties. Specifically speaking, for the long-and-thinner regions, the orientation of the targeted muscle fibre was directly computed, without voting procedures, as the orientation of the ellipse that had the same normalized second central moments as the region. For other cases, the Hough voting procedure might be employed for orientation estimation. The performance of the algorithm was evaluated using four various group of sonograms, which are a dataset used in previous reports, 33 sonograms of gastrocnemius from 11 young healthy subjects, one sonogram sequence including 200 frames from a subject and 256 frames from an aged subject with cerebral infarction respectively.

Results

It was demonstrated in the experiments that measurements of the proposed method agreed well with those of the manual method and achieved much more efficiency than the previous Re-voting Hough Transform (RVHT) algorithm.

Conclusions

Results of the experiments suggested that, without compromising the accuracy, in the proposed framework the previous orientation estimation algorithm was accelerated by reduction of its dependence on voting procedures.

【 授权许可】

   
2013 Ling et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

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