STTR Phase I: A Non-invasive Image­‐based Skeletal Muscle Analytics Tool

STTR 第一阶段：非侵入性图像

• 批准号: 1417208
• 负责人: Xue Feng
• 金额: $ 22.5万
• 依托单位: Springbok, Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-07-01 至 2015-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1417208&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: STTR; Phase; Non; invasive; Image

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.

这个小企业技术转让（STTR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是提供一个新的工具，揭示有关骨骼肌力量和健康的重要信息。肌肉无力是我们社会中普遍存在的问题，包括关节疾病患者，老年人，肥胖患者和神经肌肉疾病患者。所有这些问题都会影响全身肌肉的不同和非？]直观的方式;然而，到目前为止，还没有市场上的技术，允许定量测量肌肉上的肌肉大小-？]是吗？肌肉基础最初的目标客户是运动员组织，目标是利用该技术为运动员的训练提供信息以提高表现，并提供更多量化指标来预测受伤易感性并做出回报--？]到--？]体育决策。然而，随着技术向运动员领域的渗透，最终目标是将该技术发展到可以更广泛地在临床上用作诊断工具的程度，用于预防、诊断和治疗与肌肉骨骼疾病和移动性相关的健康状况，这将产生广泛的整体社会影响。基于建模工具，以允许高-？]运动员的整个下肢的肌肉的吞吐量成像和分割。目前，物理治疗师，运动教练和力量和调节沙发只有非常钝的工具来评估每个人？fs强度。因此，训练和康复方法是通过经验和试错来开发的。同样，由于工具非常钝，目前还不知道运动员的最佳肌肉特征是什么。这里提出的技术解决了这些问题，通过使用图像-？]到？模型管道来量化整个下肢的肌肉大小。初步证据表明，这些新的测量为表型运动员提供了全新的指标，确定了哪些肌肉轮廓导致最大的表现（例如，速度、跳跃高度、敏捷性）。目前在学术环境中开发的技术在其向市场转化的潜力方面受到限制，因为：（i）它需要非常专业的磁共振成像协议，以及（ii）分割时间对于商业可行性来说是禁止的。拟议的活动具有很高的智力价值，可以制定创新办法来解决这两个问题，最终将其从研究工具转变为商业上可行的服务。