Segmentation of Skeletal Muscle Fibres for Applications in Computational Skeletal Muscle Mechanics

We present a semi-automatic method to segment single muscle fibres from skeletal muscle cross-section images. As a pre-processing step we apply different filters depending on the type of the manually selected image region to obtain an edge image. Then we detect circles within the image by a circular Hough transform as initial rough approximation to the muscle fibre slices. This approximation is improved by active contours, where the circles are deformed to fit to the specific shape of the muscle fibres. The implementation of the segmentation method was done in Matlab. We show qualitative and quantitative results for different image regions and also outline a straight-forward method to combine several slices to obtain a 3D piece of a muscle fibre, which forms the input to an electro-mechanical skeletal muscle model.