gastrocnemius

Background/Objectives: Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) is a common consequence of eccentric exercise, characterized by pain, stiffness, and reduced function. This pilot study aimed to evaluate the effect of a single session of Active Release Technique (ART) on gastrocnemius DOMS in amateur football athletes. Methods: Twelve football athletes participated in a randomized split-body design study. All participants completed a bilateral eccentric heel-raise protocol to induce DOMS. One lower limb from each participant was randomly assigned to the ART group (single 8–10 min session), while the contralateral limb served as a control. Pain intensity was assessed using the Numeric Rating Scale (NRS) and the pressure pain threshold (PPT) was measured at baseline and at 24, 48, and 72 h post-exercise. Results: The ART group demonstrated significantly lower NRS scores at 24 h compared with the control group (p = 0.007, r = 0.77). At 48 and 72 h, NRS scores remained significantly lower (48 h: p = 0.001, d = 1.26; 72 h: p = 0.003, d = 1.11). PPT values were also significantly higher in the ART group at 24, 48 and 72 h (24 h: p = 0.026, d = 0.73; 48 h: p < 0.001, d = 1.42; 72 h: p = 0.006, d = 0.98). Conclusions: A single ART session may reduce pain and increase the pressure pain threshold following gastrocnemius DOMS in amateur football athletes. However, given the pilot design, small sample size, and absence of functional outcome measures, these findings should be interpreted with caution and confirmed in future studies.

matched text: “gastrocnemius”

Motor Neurone Disease (MND) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease, for which there is no known cure. Electromyography (EMG) is the standard technique for the detection of diagnostic indicators, such as fasciculations (twitches). Ultrasound (US) imaging may provide a more sensitive alternative to EMG for detection of fasciculations. However, only one computational technique has previously been applied to image sequences to provide an objective measure of fasciculation occurrence. The work presented here therefore describes the development and evaluation of a new computational approach, based on foreground detection using a mixture of Gaussians (GMM). In addition, the only other computational analysis approach available, which is based on feature tracking and mutual information analysis (KLT/MI) was further evaluated. Two data sets were used to evaluate the computational approaches. The first data set had previously been collected and comprised US images from medial gastrocnemius (MG) and biceps brachii (BB) from healthy (n = 20) and MND affected (n = 5) participants. The second data set comprised simultaneously recorded US images and intramuscular EMG from five muscles (medial gastrocnemius (MG), biceps brachii (BB), rectus femoris (RF), trapezius (TRAP), rectus abdominis (RA) and thoracic paraspinal (TP)) of healthy (n = 20) and MND affected (n = 20) participants. Accuracy of the approaches for fasciculation detection was evaluated against two measures of ground-truth: i) manual identification; ii) intramuscular EMG. Accuracy was defined as the area under the receiver operator curve and comparisons made between the performance of GMM and KLT/MI. Initial analysis was completed on the large limb muscles, MG and BB. The GMM had better accuracy than the KLT/MI when compared against operator identifications as the ground truth signal (88 – 94 % vs. 82 – 90 %). When EMG was used as the ground truth the GMM again had higher accuracy (81 – 88 % vs. 70 – 79 This thesis has shown a GMM computational analysis can detect fasciculations across a wide range of muscles and also can be used for the characterisation of fasciculations as they appear in ultrasound images, with significant differences being found between the healthy and MND affected participant groups. It has provided a foundation from which to build, with suggestions for future work being collecting images of stimulated twitches in a wide range of muscles for further characterisation and also a larger scale study prior to an official diagnosis being made to determine sensitivity and specificity values for this method as a diagnostic test.

matched text: “gastrocnemius”