Recognition of Finger Flexion from Ultrasound Image with Optical Flow: A Preliminary Study

Ultrasound imaging has been widely used to investigate the morphological changes during skeletal muscle contraction. In this study, the ultrasound images were recorded from extensor muscle during finger flexion, and the optical flow algorithm was used to recognize the muscle deformation for different fingers' flexions. The preliminary results demonstrated that the directions of optical flow and deformation areas of muscle contraction at certain location were different for five fingers' flexions. The proposed approach has the potential to classify finger flexion with the feature extraction from optical flow field.