Changes in muscular pennation angle after crenotherapy

Absolute and relative reliability of lumbar interspinous process ultrasound imaging measurements

[Purpose] The intra- and inter-examiner reliabilities of lumbar interspinous process distances measured by ultrasound imaging were examined. [Subjects and Methods] The subjects were 10 males who had no history of orthopedic diseases or dysfunctions. Ten lumbar interspinous images from 360 images captured from 10 subjects were selected. The 10 images were measured by nine examiners. The lumbar interspinous process distance measurements were performed five times by each examiner. In addition, four of the nine examiners measured the distances again after 4 days for test-retest analysis. In statistical analysis, the intraclass correlation coefficient was used to investigate relative reliability, and Bland-Altman analysis was used to investigate absolute reliability. [Results] The intraclass correlation coefficients (1, 1) for intra-examiner reliability ranged from 0.985 to 0.998. For inter-rater reliability, the intraclass correlation coefficient (2, 1) was 0.969. The intraclass correlation coefficients (1, 2) for test-retest reliability ranged from 0.991 to 0.999. The Bland-Altman analysis results indicated no systematic error. [Conclusion] The results indicate that ultrasound measurements of interspinous process distance are highly reliable even when measured only once by a single person.

Muscle Injuries: A Brief Guide to Classification and Management

Muscle injuries are frequent in athletes. Despite their high incidence, advances in clinical diagnostic criteria and imaging, their optimal management and rehabilitation strategies are still debated in literature. Furthermore, reinjury rate is high after a muscle lesion, and an improper treatment or an early return to sports can increase the rate of reinjury and complications. Most muscle injuries are managed conservatively with excellent results, and surgery is normally advocated only for larger tears. This article reviews the current literature to provide physicians and rehabilitation specialists with the necessary basic tools to diagnose, classify and to treat muscle injuries. Based on anatomy, biomechanics, and imaging features of muscle injury, the use of a recently reported new classification system is also advocated.

An efficient framework for estimation of muscle fiber orientation using ultrasonography

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.