Measurement of Skeletal Muscle Thickness

The change of muscle thickness (MT) can effectively reflect muscle activity during contraction, and is an important index for musculoskeletal studies in sports science or rehabilitation engineering. This chapter introduces the development of MT measurement technology from multiple perspectives, including: 1D to 2D and cross-sectional to longitudinal plane of muscles. The transverse cross-sectional perspective introduces the application of cross-correlation technology, compression tracking, and other technologies. The longitudinal perspective introduces the methods based on the revoting Hough transform, method based on MI-FFD registration, and local and global intensity fitting (LGIF) method, etc. These technologies developed in the field of computer vision have been successfully applied in musculoskeletal ultrasound and strongly promote the automated process of muscle thickness measurement.