Reconstruction of 3D Muscle Fiber Structure Using High Resolution Cryosectioned Volume

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) muscle fiber architecture is important in patient-specific biomechanical simulation. While several in-vivo methods using diffusion tensor imaging and ultrasound have been demonstrated their feasibility in reconstruction of the fiber architecture, the main challenge is the lack of gold standard. Although physical measurement from cadavers has been considered as the accurate way of determining 3D muscle fiber architecture, its downsides include error in the manual tracing and the labor intensive process allowing only sparse sampling of a particular muscle. We propose an alternative method of obtaining a dense fiber architecture of multiple muscles in close proximity using high resolution cryosectioned images. Similar to the diffusion tensor imaging, we first extract the local orientation at each voxel using the structure tensor analysis and then tractography algorithm is applied to obtain stream lines. The proposed method was applied to all muscles around the hip joint and the masticatory muscles. Qualitative comparison with the anatomy textbook indicated that the proposed method reconstructed a plausible muscle fiber architecture. We plan to make the reconstructed fiber architecture of whole body muscles publicly available in order to serve for the biomechanics community.