A new medical imaging tool created by Simon Fraser University associate professor James Wakeling may help orthopaedic surgeons working with tendon-transfers for cerebral palsy patients and those with other conditions. The new invention is a medical imaging tool that includes a new signal-processing method for looking at muscle activation details.

Wakeling’s method for looking at muscle movement includes a new way of looking at ultrasound imaging, 3D motion-capture technology and proprietary data-processing software. The ultimate product is a 3D map of the muscle structure that can be produced in only 90 seconds.

Previous methods for medical-imaging of the muscles took 15 minutes to produce – which is far too long to ask people to hold one muscle contraction. Now, with the new technology, surgeons will, hopefully, have new software programs that will help them to predict the outcome of orthopaedic surgeries for treating cerebral palsy in children and other muscle conditions.

Wakeling developed the software with graduate student Manku Rana. As Wakeling explained, “Now, we can get people to do muscle contractions and we can actually see how the internal structure of the muscle changes.”

At the moment, software packages leave out important information about muscle contractions, and these are details that the new software can capture. The new software can now show how the muscle shape changes, how it bulges at times, and even how the internal muscle fibres might curve.

As Wakeling said, “We’re poised to start making new observations and insights,” he says, “and to do new experiments that haven’t been possible before.”