title: Fully Automated Muscle Ultrasound Analysis (MUSA): Robust and Accurate Muscle Thickness Measurement.
abstract: Musculoskeletal ultrasound imaging allows non-invasive measurement of skeletal muscle thickness. Current techniques generally suffer from manual operator dependency, while all the computer-aided approaches are limited to be semi-automatic or specifically optimized for a single muscle. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a fully automatic method, named MUSA (Muscle UltraSound Analysis), for measurement of muscle thickness on longitudinal ultrasound images acquired from different skeletal muscles. The MUSA algorithm was tested on a database of 200 B-mode ultrasound images of rectus femoris, vastus lateralis, tibialis anterior and medial gastrocnemius. The automatic muscle thickness measurements were compared to the manual measurements obtained by three operators. The MUSA algorithm achieved a 100% segmentation success rate, with mean differences between the automatic and manual measurements in the range of 0.06-0.45 mm. MUSA performance was statistically equal to the operators and its measurement accuracy was independent of the muscle thickness value.
authors.affiliation: Biolab, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Caresio
authors.affiliation: Biolab, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Salvi
authors.affiliation: Biolab, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy. Electronic address: filippo.molinari@polito.it.
authors.forename: Filippo
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Molinari
authors.affiliation: Biolab, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Kristen M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Meiburger
authors.affiliation: Division of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Turin, Turin, Italy; Division of Endocrinology, Diabetology and Metabolism, Department of Medical Sciences, University of Turin, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Marco Alessandro
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Minetto
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D001837:Body Weights and Measures / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D018482:Muscle, Skeletal / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014463:Ultrasonography / Q000379:methods*
keywords: Automatic muscle thickness measurements; Muscle ultrasonography; Musculoskeletal ultrasound