Abstract
Muscle functional MRI (mfMRI) is an imaging technique that assess muscles’ activity, exploiting a shift in the T2-relaxation time between resting and active state on muscles. It is accompanied by the use of electromyography (EMG) to have a better understanding of the muscle electrophysiology; however, a technique merging MRI and EMG information has not been defined yet. In this paper, we present an anatomical and quantitative evaluation of a method our group recently introduced to quantify its validity in terms of muscle pattern estimation for four subjects during four isometric tasks. Muscle activation pattern are estimated using a resistive network to model the morphology in the MRI. An inverse problem is solved from sEMG data to assess muscle activation. The results have been validated with a comparison with physiological information and with the fitting on the electrodes space. On average, over 90% of the input sEMG information was able to be explained with the estimated muscle patterns. There is a match with anatomical information, even if a strong subjectivity is observed among subjects. With this paper we want to proof the method’s validity showing its potential in diagnostic and rehabilitation fields.
Highlights
In the study of neuromuscular degenerative disease and in the development of rehabilitation therapies to treat them, monitoring the activity of muscles is crucial to better understand the nature of the impairment and to have a feedback about the changes occurring after applied treatments
For the sake of clarity the polar plots were created assuming that the arm section is circular and that it is divided into ne + 1 sectors by ne electrodes arranged with equal space between each other
We presented a novel method for the estimation of muscle activity
Summary
In the study of neuromuscular degenerative disease and in the development of rehabilitation therapies to treat them, monitoring the activity of muscles is crucial to better understand the nature of the impairment and to have a feedback about the changes occurring after applied treatments. For muscle studies in particular, a prolongation in T2 relaxation time between rest and intensive muscle activity has been reported to be useful for a quantitative evaluation of muscle activity [1] This technique is referred as muscle functional MRI (mfMRI) and has been used in studies on lower back [3,4,5,6], lower limbs [7,8], upper limbs [9,10], shoulder [11], hip abductors [12] and plantar flexion movements [13]. It allowed the estimation of the activity of all muscles in the considered field of view with a single scan, showing particular advantage for the study of deeper muscles that have usually prohibitive access with other methods
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