Muscle Architecture Analysis Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

The trajectories of skeletal muscle fascicles are critical to their function, and many skeletal muscles across the body have fascicles with highly complex trajectories. Architectural descriptions of muscles account for fascicle trajectories by reporting parameters such as fascicle length, physiological cross-sectional area, and pennation angle. These parameters are typically reported as constants [1], yet it has been shown that some muscles have large distributions of these parameters [2]. Cadaveric studies of muscle architecture can be timeconsuming and do not represent young healthy or patient-specific populations, and MRI diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies of muscle architecture can suffer from noisy data acquisition [3]. We present a method to calculate architecture parameters from arbitrarily complex muscles automatically using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). This method can be used to map and examine the three-dimensional architecture of a given muscle, and it can also be used as input to 3D finite-element models of muscle [4].