Echo Intensity Paper

Echo intensity is commonly used to assess muscle quality as an outcome measure in muscle physiology research. Muscle quality is an indicator of overall functional capacity and is negatively correlated with echo intensity (Watanabe et al., 2013). Echo intensity is defined as the mean pixel intensity in the muscle and is determined by gray scale analysis using B-mode ultrasonography (US; Watanabe et al., 2013). Lean muscle has low echogenicity while muscle with higher amounts of fibrous and adipose tissue has higher echo intensity values (Goodpaster et al., 2001). Current research is focusing on creating algorithms to determine percent intramuscular fat based off of EI values (Young et al., 2015). This will make EI measurements between studies more comparable. Eventually muscle quality will hopefully be used not only as an outcome measurement in research but in a clinical setting as well.
Muscle quality is defined, as the ratio of muscle strength to muscle quantity, and higher muscle quality is indicative of greater overall functional capacity (Watanabe et al., 2013). It is also an important indicator of overall strength and muscle health in many populations, including older adults and professional athletes (Fukumoto et al., 2012; Mangine et …show more content…
Lamminen et al., examined 24 healthy children and 20 children with NMDs. All children with muscular dystrophy had clearly abnormal US images with increased echogenicity, and the majority of images from children with benign myopathic disorders had higher echogenicity as well. Many studies similar to this have shown higher echogenicity in children with NMDs, making US an easy method of examining these disorders. However, EI values are arbitrary and specific to the US model being used (Pillen et al., 2009). For this reason, EI values from US imaging cannot properly be used as a clinical measurement at this