3.15pm Wed 9th Dec 2020, remote

Ultrasound imaging is a widely used modality that has been applied to study features of skeletal muscle anatomy and in vivo mechanical behaviour in human health and disease for many years.  Recently there has been a focus on detecting activity of individual motor units within the muscle using ultrasound images, as this could provide a sensitive, non-invasive means of supporting diagnosis and monitoring of neurodegenerative changes associated with diseases such as Motor Neurone Disease. This talk will provide an overview of our work to identify and measure new features of skeletal muscle characteristics and behaviour from ultrasound image sequences, with the use of computer vision and machine learning image analysis approaches. I will discuss how these approaches more fully exploit the information content of recorded images to provide objective measures of dynamic muscle behaviour in vivo and consider the potential to provide new non-invasive approaches of quantifying skeletal muscle health.