Intramuscular nerve distribution pattern of ankle invertor muscles in human cadaver using sihler stain.

INTRODUCTION: We sought to the ideal sites for botulinum toxin injection by examining the intramuscular nerve patterns of the ankle invertors. METHODS: A modified Sihler method was performed on the flexor hallucis longus, tibialis posterior, and flexor digitorum longus muscles (10 specimens each). The muscle origins, nerve entry points, and intramuscular arborization areas were measured as a percentage of the total distance from the most prominent point of the lateral malleolus (0%) to the fibular head (100%). RESULTS: Intramuscular arborization patterns were observed at 20-50% for the flexor hallucis longus, 70-80% for the tibialis posterior, and 30-40% for the flexor digitorum longus. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that treatment of muscle spasticity of the ankle invertors involves botulinum toxin injections in specific areas. These areas, corresponding to the areas of maximum arborization, are recommended as the most effective and safest points for injection.

Detection and restoration of defective lines in the SPOT 4 SWIR band.

This paper presents the categorization and restoration of defective lines developed in pushbroom images. About 100 of the 3000 SPOT 4 SWIR detectors malfunction, which degrades image quality. Conventional methods have difficulties in effectively detecting and restoring defective lines, because they ignore the heterogeneity of the ground surface and the presence of sporadically unstable detectors with gain and offset that vary during a scan. While all defective lines have previously been considered as a single type, here they are categorized into three types according to the variation pattern in the scanning direction: constant defective lines, irregular defective lines, and irrecoverable defective lines. The detection procedure utilizes summed data and standard deviation data that consist of abnormal peaks originating from defective lines and a slowly varying baseline reflecting the surface characteristics within the image. The defective lines are detected by finding abnormal peaks, and classified and restored by using either a moment-matching method or interpolation, depending upon their types. Three SPOT 4 images were used to test and evaluate the performance of the proposed method. From the test results, the constant defective line was the most common type, comprising about 60%, while the irregular defective lines caused serious image degradation because of the difficulty of detecting and classifying them. Commission and omission errors were less than 10% and detection accuracy was higher than 90%. The analysis of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) showed that the low SNR created by the defective lines was effectively removed. Our method gave a significant improvement of the detection and restoration capability.