connecting two muscle attachment areas highlighted
on this template. This template of the fibre geome-
try is mapped into this template hexahedral mesh. Fi-
nally, the template mesh is projected into the volume
of muscle by a proprietary mapping method available
in the commercial TrueGRID (XYZ Scientific Appli-
cations) software. Although much easier definition of
muscle fibres is presented, the dependence on an ex-
pensive commercial tool together with the large mem-
ory consumption (because of 3D mesh) renders this
approach also quite impractical.
Representing a muscle with a triangular surface
mesh is very popular, especially, due to its simplic-
ity and low memory requirements. Although vari-
ous technique for deforming this mesh as bones move
were described, such as mesh-skinning based ap-
proaches (Kohout et al., 2011), (Aubel and Thalmann,
2000), mass-spring systems (Thalmann, 1998) or gra-
dient domain (Kohout et al., 2012), as far as we know,
no method is available at present for a decomposition
of the volume of the deformed muscle (defined by its
mesh surface) into muscle fibres.
Hence, in this paper, we propose a simple tech-
nique that can decompose the muscle volume into
muscle fibres by a slice-by-slice morphing of prede-
fined fibres template (proposed by Blemker & Delp)
into the interior of the muscle, employing mapping
technique described in (Hormann and Floater, 2006).
The remainder of this paper is structured as fol-
lows. In the next section, we give a brief brings an
overview of our method; details are described in sec-
tions 3. Section 4 presents the experiments that were
performed. Section 5 concludes the paper and pro-
vides an overview of possible future work.
2 METHOD OVERVIEW
Our method is designed to process any muscle rep-
resented by its surface mesh for which information
about its attachment areas, i.e., about sites at which
the muscle is attached to the bone by a tendon, is
available. This information is typically provided as
two sets of landmarks, one for the origin and the other
for the insertion area, specified by an expert. Every
landmark is fixed to an underlying bone, so that when
bones move (during the simulation of various activi-
ties), so do landmarks. The number of landmarks in
the set define the accuracy of the fibres generated. We
note that for many muscles, it is sufficient to spec-
ify just one landmark. Figure 1 shows an example of
muscles and their landmarks.
For each muscle to be decomposed, it is also nec-
essary to specify (again by an expert) what type of
Figure 1: Gluteus Medius (left) and Semimembranosus
(right) with their attachment areas. The origin area is blue,
the insertion area is red.
muscle fibres it contains, if parallel, pennate, curved,
fanned or something else. According to this informa-
tion, the method selects a predefined template con-
taining the description of fibres geometry. As we
seek to decompose the muscle into an arbitrarily large
number of fibres, the requested number of fibres to be
constructed and their resolution must be also defined.
We note that the resolution of a fibre is the number
of segments along its length, e.g., if the resolution is
19 (the default value in our case), each fibre is repre-
sented by a poly-line of 20 points. We would expect
that the higher the resolution, the smoother the curve
of the fibre will be and, therefore, the better will be
the correspondence with anatomical fibres. It is im-
portant to point out that these settings (i.e, the type of
fibres, their number and resolution) can be specified
by an expert and then stored with the atlas data, so
that no input is required from an ordinary user (e.g., a
student of medicine).
The decomposition method starts with the pro-
duction of muscle fibres of the requested resolution
within the unit template cube. It involves exploitation
of Sobol points (Joe and Kuo, 2008) and muscle fi-
bre geometry templates (Blemker and Delp, 2005). In
the next step, this template cube is subject to an affine
transformation to form the best fit to the muscle to be
decomposed. The transformed template is an oriented
bounding box (OBB) of the muscle whose attachment
areas are aligned with those specified as input.
After the template cube has been fitted to the mus-
cle, the poly-lines representing the fibres undergo the
MUSCLE FIBRES MODELLING
59