• PNF and Movement
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• 제17권2호
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• pp.329-337
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• 2019

Purpose: Ultrasound imaging is commonly used to measure the pennation angle of human skeletal muscles in vivo. However, manual assessment of the pennation angle using ultrasound images is subjective and time-consuming and requires a high level of examiner skill. The architectural analysis of human skeletal muscles is thus challenging. Automated approaches using image processing techniques are therefore required to estimate the pennation angle in ultrasound images. The purpose of this study was thus to assess the intra-tester and inter-tester reliability and validity of the pennation angle using an automatic measurement program. Methods: Twenty-two healthy young adults (mean age = 22.55 years) with no medical history of neurological or musculoskeletal disorders voluntarily participated in this study. Ultrasound imaging was used to measure the pennation angle of the gastrocnemius muscle at rest. One examiner acquired images from all the participants. The intra-tester and inter-tester reliability were evaluated using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) to estimate reliability. Validity was measured using Pearson's correlation coefficient. Results: The intra-rater reliability was excellent for the automatic pennation angle measuring program and the manual pennation angle assessment method (ICC>0.95). The inter-rater reliability was also excellent for both methods (ICC>0.93). All the correlation coefficients for the automatic pennation angle measuring program and the manual pennation angle assessment method were 0.79, which indicated a significantly positive correlation (p<0.05). Conclusion: Pennation angle measurement using the automatic pennation angle measuring program showed acceptable reliability and validity. This study therefore demonstrated that the automatic measuring program was able to automatically measure the pennation angle of skeletal muscles using ultrasound images, and thus made it easy to investigate skeletal muscle architecture.

• 대한통합의학회지
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• 제5권1호
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• pp.75-83
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• 2017

Purpose : The parameters used in architectural analysis are muscle thickness, fascicle length, pennation angle, etc. Pennation angle is an important muscle characteristic that plays a significant role in determining a fascicle's force contribution to movement. Ultrasonography has been widely used to obtain the image for measurement of a pennation angle since it is non-invasive and real-time. However, manual assessment in ultrasonographic images is time-consuming and subjective, making it difficult for using in muscle function analysis. Thus, in this study, I proposed an automatic method to extract the pennation angle from the ultrasonographic images of gastrocnemius muscle. Method : The ultrasonographic image obtained from 10 healthy participants's gastrocnemius muscle using for developed automatic measuring program. Automatic measuring program algorithm consists with preprocessing, line detection, line classification, and angle calculation. The resulting image was then used to detect the fascicles and aponeuroses for calculating the pennation angle with the consideration of their distribution in ultrasonographic image. Result : The proposed automatic measurement program showed the stable repeatability of pennation angle calculation. Conclusion : This study demonstrated that the proposed method was able to automatically measure the pennation angle of gastrocnemius, which made it possible to easily and reliably investigate pennation angle more.