Muscle injury determination by image segmentation

Clinical examination of Congenital Muscular Torticollis (CMT) is often carried out by ultrasound equipments. However, a variety of subjective factors during diagnosis may result in wrong decision. Thus, we propose an image processing algorithm to derive the objective judgment on the healthiness of muscle in this paper. We first apply image segmentation technique, such as the fast scanning algorithm, for ultrasonic muscle image segmentation. Then, the proposed algorithms are applied to determine the healthiness of muscle fibers. We furthermore propose a score criterion to evaluate the degree of injury. The experimental results show that the injury score measured by the proposed methods can successfully determine whether the muscle is hurt and infer the extent of fibrosis.