In-vivo cervical spine FSU dynamic motion measured by dual ultrasound: The effect of muscle activation

The etiology of neck pain is commonly evaluated by static X-Ray, CT or MRI images. Recently, we demonstrated that ultrasound (US) was capable of providing non-invasive, real-time, dynamic images of cervical spine functional spine units (FSU) ex-vivo that reflected their mechanical properties. In this work, we present a dual US system to measure the dynamic motion of cervical spine FSUs in-vivo for human subjects repetitively jumping from a height to evaluate the effect of para-cervical muscle activities on the dynamic mechanical properties of the FSU.