Texture analysis of myopathy

Given the recent technological advent of muscle ultrasound (US), classification of various myopathic conditions could be possible, especially by mathematical analysis of muscular fine structure called texture analysis. We prospectively enrolled patients with three neuromuscular conditions and their lower leg US images were quantitatively analyzed by texture analysis and machine learning methodology in the following subjects : Inclusion body myositis (IBM) [N=11] ; myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) [N=19] ; polymyositis/dermatomyositis (PM-DM) [N=21]. Although three-group analysis achieved up to 58.8% accuracy, two-group analysis of IBM plus PM-DM versus DM1 showed 78.4% accuracy. Despite the small number of subjects, texture analysis of muscle US followed by machine learning might be expected to be useful in identifying myopathic conditions

Texture in aging

Texture analysis characterizes regions in an image by their texture content and has been utilized to infer the underlying structures of medical images such as skeletal muscles. Although potentially useful in tissue diagnosis and assessing disease progression of neuromuscular diseases, the use of texture analysis in such purposes are limited, due to lack of information such as effects of aging. Thus, we performed texture analysis of medial gastrocnemius in healthy individuals form their 20s to late 80s. Among the 283 texture features in 6 classes, the features related to histogram, co-occurrence matrix, absolute gradient, and wavelet were correlated to age in 17-40% of the parameters, while none of the features related to run-length matrix and autoregressive model had significant correlation to age. This study showed that age-dependency in many texture features are present and need to be taken into account in elucidating the clinical significance. By contrast, the features related to run-length matrix and autoregressive model could have clinical utility

Polyurethanes containing platinum in the main chain : Synthesis, structure and mechanofluorochromism

Hydroxy-tethered platinum(II) complexes were synthesized and used as diol monomers for polyurethane synthesis. Polyurethanes with moderate molecular weights were obtained by the conventional polyaddition with a diisocyanate. The polyurethane containing platinum(II) complex substituted with t-Bu groups was well soluble in common organic solvents including CHCl₃ and tetrahydrofuran. Segmented polyurethanes containing platinum(II) complex moieties were also synthesized using polytetrahydrofuran and 1,4-butanediol. They showed good elastic properties. The non-segmented polyurethane exhibited distinguishable photoluminescence changes upon grinding in the solid state, while the segmented polyurethanes did not.This research was financially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP21K05203, the Kansai University Fund for Supporting Young Scholars, 2021