Automatic Estimation of Biceps Brachi Muscle Thickness in B-Mode Ultrasound Images

摘要

Muscle thickness is an important parameter used for quantifying musculoskeletal function. At present, the muscle thickness measurement relies on the manual method, which is subjective, time-consuming, and prone to error. In this paper, a novel automatic calculation method was proposed to achieve the continuous and quantitative measurement for the muscle thickness of biceps brachi in ultrasound images. The proposed method includes three steps: the detection and tracking of the seed point in the superficial aponeurosis, the detection and tracking of the feature line in the deep aponeurosis, and the muscle thickness estimation. The performance of the proposed method was firstly compared to the manual measured results, which demonstrates that they have a good agreement during the experiment and can be used for efficiently estimating the muscle thickness of biceps brachi in the musculoskeletal ultrasound images. Then, the validated method was employed to investigate the relationship between the muscle thickness and the joint angle. The results show that, the elbow flexion and extension angle has an approximately linear relationship with muscle thickness change.