Estimation of Muscle Fiber Orientation in Ultrasound Images Using Revoting Hough Transform (RVHT)

Abstract

1Ultrasound imaging has been frequently used for the study of muscle contraction, 2 including measurements of pennation angles and fascicle orientations. However, these 3 measurements were traditionally conducted by manually drawing lines on the 4 ultrasound images. In this study, we proposed a modified Hough transform (HT), 5 aiming at automatically estimating orientations of straight-line-shaped patterns, such 6 as muscle fibers and muscle-bone interface in ultrasound images. The new method 7 first located the global maximum in the HT accumulator matrix, which corresponded 8 to the most dominant collinear feature points globally, using the standard HT; then the 9 pixels close to the detected line were removed from the edge map, the HT 10 accumulator matrix was calculated again, i.e. revoting, and a new line was detected; 11 the iteration was repeated until the predefined termination conditions were satisfied. 12The performance of the algorithm was tested using computer-generated images with

Ultrasound Imaging and Muscle Function

“…22,23 As a decrease in muscle size has been linked to various pathologies and impairments, 16,19 the use of the technology has continued to expand to include investigation of muscles such as the supraspinatus and infraspinatus, 35 rectus femoris, 13 biceps brachii, 2 transversus abdominis (TrA) and internal oblique (IO), 20 rectus abdominis, 8 cervical multifidus, 45 trapezius, 56 rectus femoris, sartorius, and iliopsoas. 53 Other aspects of muscle morphology and function that have been explored with USI include composition, 44,61,66 changes in internal architecture (pennation angles), 48,80 force generation, 13 and muscle activity (ie, electrical activity recorded by electromyography [EMG]). 6,28,34,36,52 While physical therapists are familiar with therapeutic ultrasound and the underlying physics, they often lack training regarding the principles and instrumentation underlying USI.…”

Rapid three-dimensional quantification of voxel-wise collagen fiber orientation

“…In addition, collagen fiber orientation provides a potential biomarker for diagnosing diseased tissues, assessing response to treatments, localizing injuries, or monitoring engineered tissue development [6][7][8][9][10]. A number of techniques, such as ones based on the Fourier transform [11][12][13], Hough transform [10,14], and principal component analysis [15][16][17] are widely employed to quantify fiber orientation within two dimensional (2D) images. The applications of these 2D techniques have shown potential in providing orientation distribution information to assess collagenous tissues and understand interactions between cells and the ECM.…”

Estimation of longitudinal muscle motion using a primal-dual algorithm

“…Many imaging modalities have been used to study muscle and its functions. Ultrasonography (US) has been one of most attractive ways of assessing human muscles under both static and dynamic conditions since its low cost, high flexibility and extraordinary patient friendliness [9] and has been proved to be able accurately measure the changes of muscle thickness [10] [11], fiber length [12,13], pennation angle [14][15][16] and cross sectional area [17,18]. Some algorithms were reported to be able to track important features of contracting muscle from one frame to the next automatically [19,20].…”