Danchin Chen1, Dimitrios C. Karampinos1,2,
Armen Gharibans1, Kevin F. King3, John G. Georgiadis1,2
1Mechanical Science and Engineering,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, United States; 2Beckman
Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, United States; 3GE Healthcare,
Waukesha, WI, United States
Driven
by the hypothesis that the secondary eigenvector field in DTI of skeletal
muscle reflects the muscle ultrastructure transverse to fiber orientation, we
superimpose the flow fields of the primary and secondary eigenvectors
extracted from DTI data comprising axial slices of the mid-calf. V1 aligns with the local myofiber direction
and the V2 field is topologically consistent with the putative orientation of
the inter-myocellular force transmission.
3-D reconstruction of the eigenvector flow fields and consistency of
the secondary eigenvector orientation in the proximodistal direction provide
preliminary evidence of the presence of a woven fabric in skeletal muscle.
Keywords