Changes in Elastic Modulus of Muscles from Multi-Parametric MRI and Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering

Delphine Perie¹, ², Daniel Curnier³, ⁴

The long-term objective is to quantify the early changes in the muscle elastic modulus that occur with different muscle diseases using multi-parametric MRI. We hypothesized that multi-parametric MRI is able to characterize muscles with large mechanical differences. We developed an evaluative quantitative tool of the mechanical properties of muscle tissue using multi-parametric MRI associated to principal component analysis and agglomerative hierarchical clustering. We confirmed that a non linear relationship exists between the Youngs modulus and the MRI parameters of different types of muscle. The natural division into two clusters on the dendrograms reflected the ability of our method to classify different muscle tissues.