Dynamic measurement of pennation angle of gastrocnemius muscles during contractions based on ultrasound imaging

BioMedical Engineering OnLine

Yong-Ping Zheng¹  Guangquan Zhou¹  Ji-Zhou Li²  Yongjin Zhou¹ 

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

[2]College of Mathematics and Econometrics, Hunan University, Changsha, China

关键词: Orientation;    Gastrocnemius muscle;    EMG;    Electromyography;    SMG;    Sonomyography;    Hough transform;    Pennation angle;    Ultrasound image;   

Others  :  798025
DOI  :  10.1186/1475-925X-11-63

 received in 2012-08-08, accepted in 2012-08-28,  发布年份 2012

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

   
2012 Zhou et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

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