Ultrasound Imaging and Analysis of Muscle Activity in Lower Limb

Abstract

Abstract. This study aimed to investigate the possibility of using ultrasound images as a tool of quantitative analysis for muscle activity. One expected advantage of ultrasound imaging is that it could provide a non-invasive way to investigate the activities of both outer and inner muscles. In the literature, there have been fewer studies exploring the ultrasound image analysis for quantitative analysis of muscle activity, i.e., the estimation of spatiotemporal aspect of muscle contraction, such as, the power, the latency. This is why this study attempted to investigate different features extracted from the ultrasound images, to represent the muscle activity. For this purpose we measured the ultrasound images, as well as Electromyogram, and joint angle simultaneously, during the voluntary contraction, and muscle activity activated by the Achilles tendon reflex, in which temporal aspect of muscle activity should be precisely investigated. We were able to quantify the inner and outer muscle activity by measuring the muscle thickness, pennation angle and long-axis displacement.

Ultrasonic evaluation of muscle functional recovery following free functioning gracilis transfer, a preliminary study

“…B-ultrasound is non-invasive, convenient, and cheap, and can reflect muscle strength by echo density, muscle thickness, cross-sectional area, and intermuscular volume [15][16][17][18][19]. Compared to the static observation of MRI, B-ultrasound can observe the dynamic contraction of muscle.…”

Ultrasonic Evaluation of Muscle Recovery Following Free Functioning Gracilis Transfer, A Preliminary Study

“…B-ultrasound is non-invasive, convenient, and cheap, which can re ect muscle strength by echo density, muscle thickness, cross-sectional area, and intermuscular volume. [14][15][16][17][18] Compared with the static observation of MRI, B-ultrasound can observe the dynamic contraction of muscle. Ultrasonic measurement can easily obtain morphological data of muscle, such as muscle thickness and crosssectional area.…”

Ultrasound imaging and semi-automatic analysis of active muscle features in electrical stimulation by optical flow

“…In many of those works stated [7] [8], researchers had the measurement manually by checking each ultrasound image on the dataset. However, manual calculation of muscle thickness and pennation angle for ultrasound image sequences takes Shota Kawamoto * , Nevrez Imamoglu, Jose D. Gomez-Tames are with Graduate School of Engineering, Chiba University, Japan (e-mail: s42kawamoto@gmail.com).…”