Automatic Estimation of Muscle Thickness in Ultrasound Images Based on Revoting Hough Transform (RVHT)

As an important parameter related to musculoskeletal functions, muscle thickness has been studied for various purposes. However, muscle thickness is usually measured manually by an experienced clinical expert, which is subjective and time consuming, and there are few studies on automatic tracking of muscle thickness during dynamic contraction. In this paper, we proposed a modified Hough transform (HT) to achieve the quantitative and continuous measurement for muscle thickness in ultrasound images. The method involved three steps: image enhancement, locating of superficial and deep aponeuroses by RVHT, and computation of the distance between aponeuroses. The performance of the new method is evaluated using ultrasound images from gastrocnemius muscles of seven patients. The result from the proposed method is also compared to manual detection and another method which was based on Compressive Tracking Algorithm (CTA) applied in our previous work. It was demonstrated in the experiment that the proposed method agrees well with the manual measurement and was able to provide a more convenient and effective approach than the CTA. It could be used for objective muscle thickness tracking in musculoskeletal ultrasound images.