A statistical approach for muscle fascicle orientation estimation in ultrasound images

Ultrasound imaging has been widely used to investigate muscle properties. The fascicle orientation is usually measured manually, which is subjective and time consuming In this study, an automatic estimation method based on statistical characteristic of the fascicle region is proposed to detect the fascicle orientation. The performance of the proposed method is compared to manual detection using clinical images from human subject. The experimental results show that the proposed method is robust, and the difference between the two methods is within 1 degree. The proposed method has the potential for widespread application in biology sciences.