This study has described and experimentally validated the differential electrodes surface electromyography (sEMG) model for tibialis anterior muscles during isometric contraction. This model has investigated the effect of pennation angle on the simulated sEMG signal. The results show that there is no significant effect of pennation angle in the range 0° to 20° to the single fibre action potenti...

Precise estimates of muscle architecture are necessary to understand and model muscle mechanics. The primary aim of this study was to estimate continuous changes in fascicle length and pennation angle in human gastrocnemius muscles during ramped plantar flexor contractions at two ankle angles. The secondary aim was to determine whether these changes differ between proximal and distal fascicles....

[Purpose] To investigate the effects of progressive functional training on lower limb muscle architecture and motor function of children with spastic cerebral palsy (CP). [Subjects] The subjects of this study were 26 children with spastic CP. [Methods] Thirteen subjects in the experimental group performed general neurodevelopmental treatment (NDT) and additional progressive functional trainings...

BACKGROUND Muscle fascicle pennation angle (PA) is an important parameter related to musculoskeletal functions, and ultrasound imaging has been widely used for measuring PA, but manually and frame by frame in most cases. We have earlier reported an automatic method to estimate aponeurosis orientation based on Gabor transform and Revoting Hough Transform (RVHT). METHODS In this paper, we propo...

There are currently few studies in the literature concerning the reliability and validity of the quantification of parameters of muscle architecture using the technique of ultrasound. The aim of this study is to apply the technique of ultrasound imaging to quantify pennation angle of gastrocnemius muscle (medial and lateral) and to determine the reliability and reproducibility of these measures...

Diffusion-tensor MRI (DT-MRI) offers great potential for understanding structure-function relationships in human skeletal muscles. The purposes of this study were to demonstrate the feasibility of using in vivo human DT-MRI fiber tracking data for making pennation angle measurements and to test the hypothesis that heterogeneity in the orientation of the tibialis anterior (TA) muscle’s aponeuros...

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between muscle properties (MP) and force production (F) during a sprint running acceleration phase in 18 male sprinters (Age: 24.4±4 years; personal best: 10.66±0.5 s). MP (muscle thickness, fascicle length and pennation angle) of the lower limb muscles were measured by B-mode ultrasonography and F was modelled at each instant by derivat...

Introduction: Mechanisms of force loss that occur during progressive muscular diseases are more and more studied using mouse models. Such diseases generally cause both a decrease in maximal tension and progressive muscle wasting, which may result in profound changes in muscle architecture. Muscle architecture is a main determinant of the mechanical behavior of skeletal muscle [1], and is charac...

We have developed a technique to determine fascicle length in human vastus lateralis muscle in vivo by using ultrasonography. When the subjects had the knee fully extended passively from a position of 110 degree flexion (relaxed condition), the fascicle length decreased from 133 to 97 mm on average. During static contractions at 10% of maximal voluntary contraction strength (tensed condition), ...