Automatic Detection of Muscle Thickness from Ultrasound Images: A Novel Approach Based on Optical Flow
NationalRegional Key Technology Engineering Laboratory for Medical Ultrasound, Guangdong Key Laboratory for Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging, Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
Abstract：Ultrasound images can be used to study properties of human muscles noninvasively, with the advantages of real time and low cost. Manual measurement of muscle thickness from ultrasound images is subjective and timeconsuming. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to detect the muscle thickness automatically. Optical flow was adopted to track the superficial and deep fascias of a muscle, and the muscle thickness was geometrically obtained based on the location of the fascias. In the continuous motion conditions, dynamic ultrasound images of thighs of 10 healthy volunteers were tracking measurement. Experimental results showed that average of the absolute difference between the proposed method and manual method was (0.24±0.22) mm, the correlation coefficient was up to 0.93, and the detection speed for ultrasound frames was 10 frames per second in current implementation based on Matlab. The automated method provides an accurate and efficient approach for estimating fascicle thickness during human motion.
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