Estimation of longitudinal muscle motion using a primal-dual algorithm

Ultrasonography is a convenient and widely-used technique to view the longitudinal muscle motion as it is non-invasive and real-time. However, the estimation of longitudinal muscle motion, in sense of dense deformation field, was paid little attention to previously. In this report a primal-dual algorithm was used to estimate the motion of gastrocnemius muscle (GM) in longitudinal direction. Then a color encoding scheme and the mean velocities (mm/s) of frame-wise motion field were adopted to show the synchronous activities. The preliminary results, on 600 frames of ultrasound muscle images in motion, demonstrated that the proposed estimation method are helpful to study of the contraction of muscle in longitudinal direction, providing motion details both spatially and temporally.