A novel DTI method for quantification of skeletal muscle pennation angles

摘要

Muscle volume, muscle fiber length and pennation angles (PA) are important characteristics influencing muscle function. PA has shown to change due to training, in muscle injury and in muscle diseases [1]. However, assesment of PA over the full length and volume of an individual muscle is challenging. In this study we propose a diffusion-tensor imaging (DTI) based method to measure the PA and to create PA color maps of the whole muscle volume.