The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is to provide a new tool revealing important information regarding skeletal muscle strength and health. Muscle weakness is a pervasive problem across our society, including people with joint disease, aging people, obese people, and people with neuromuscular disorders. All these problems affect muscles across the body in different and non--?]intuitive ways; however, to date there has not been marketed technology that allows for quantitative measurement of muscle size on a muscle--?]by--?]muscle basis. The initial targeted customers are athlete organizations, with the goal of using the technology to both inform training of athletes to improve performance as well as to provide more quantitative metrics for predicting injury susceptibility and make return--?]to--?]sport decisions. However, following penetration into the athlete sector, the ultimate goal is to advance the technology to the point where it can more broadly to used clinically as a diagnostic tool to be used in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of health conditions related to musculoskeletal disease and mobility, which will have wide spanning overall societal impact.
The proposed project will provide a major advancement in image--?]based modeling tools in order to allow high--?]throughput imaging and segmentation of muscles of the entire lower limb of athletes. Currently, physical therapists, athletic trainers and strength and conditioning couches only have very blunt tools to assess each individual?fs strength. Therefore, training and rehabilitative approaches are developed via experience and trial and error. Similarly, because the tools have been very blunt, it is currently unknown what the optimal muscle characteristics of an athlete would be. The technology proposed here solves these problems by making using of an image--?]to--?]model pipeline to quantify muscle size across in the entire lower extremity. Preliminary evidence demonstrates that these new measurements provide entirely new metrics for phenotyping athletes, identifying which muscle profiles result in maximal performance (e.g., speed, jump height, agility). The current technology developed in the academic environment is limited in its potential to market translation because: (i) it requires a very specialized magnetic resonance imaging protocol, and (ii) segmentation time is prohibitive for commercial viability. The proposed activities have high intellectual merit in developing innovative approaches to solve both problems, ultimately transforming this from a research tool to a commercially viable service.
