MuscleSound

Study overview

• 3661 images taken

• 6 athletes
• 5 scanners
• 6 muscles
• 3 images taken per muscle per scanner

Image scoring methods

• Old Scoring
• New Scoring
• New Scoring using corrected crop region

Old Scoring

We score the cropped region by pixel intensities (0-255). Where 0 is black and 255 is white. Initially we found that within that range some pixel intensities acted as noise to
the signal, and were ignored.

New Scoring (coming into app.musclesound.com 11/11/2014)

We will score the cropped region in the range (0-75). Pixel intensity 75 is the threshold value between connective tissue and muscle fibers. All of the intensities darker than
75 are valuable in the measurement of glycogen content.
Corrected crop region

There were a noticeable amount of images that were cropped incorrectly.

If an images crop value was much different than they normally are for that muscle, the crop value was adjusted to the median crop value of all of the images for that muscle
Analysis

This study is most interested in quantifying the variance of MuscleSound scores in two ways. * Intra Operator variability - Variance of scores for each scanner * Inter
Operator variability - Variance of scores between different scanners

Intra operator variability

Variation by scoring method

The scoring method had little effect on this study. The variations fit within the bounds of the way MuscleSound rounds raw scores by 5’s. The median variations were under
2.5 points.
Variation overtime

Did the scanners improve over time? How long did it take them to get to a certain level of competance? This chart shows that the scanners improved during the first week,
and retained that level of competance.
Variation by scanner

The scanners all had generally about the same level of variance. KAB had the best results, while RPN produced more variance in their scores.
Variation by muscle

Each of the muscles scanned had the same type of variance. The Lateral Gastrocnemius had the least amount of variance.
Inter operator variability

Variation by scoring method

The scoring method had little effect on this study. The variations increased slightly when measured between scanners from a median of 2.5 points to 3.5 points
Conclusion

• The variation of scores in this study closely relates to the variation of scores across all of the images in the MuscleSound system. The repeatability results match the
expectations of regular MuscleSound use.
• The improved scoring method, will have little effect on this study
• Incorrectly cropped images have a limited affect on the variation of scores in this study because, the improved score does not change very much and/or there are not
a significant amount of incorrectly cropped images.
• Scanners can become competant in taking images very quickly.