The investigation of reliability and validity of ultrasonography in measurement of fascicle length, fascicle angle, and thickness of skeletal muscle during contraction: A systematic review

In the recent years, ultrasonography has widely been used to measure skeletal muscle architecture parameters such as fascicle length, fascicle angle, and muscle thickness, that provide an opportunity to be able to objectively estimate muscle force production capacity in biomechanical and biophysiological researches. The current review article aimed to systematically reviw the investigations of reliability and validity of ultrasonography in measurement of muscle structure parameters during isometric and isotonic contractions in the existing studies.
A literature review was conducted on studies published between 1995-2014 in PubMed, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Google scholar, and Springer Link databases. The following terms were used as key words: Ultrosonography, muscle architecture, reliability, validity, fascicle length, and contraction.
A total of 109 articles were obtained from which 40 were chosen based on their titles. After studying the abstracts and full texts, 28 were considered to be congruent with the inclusion criteria. Several statistics were run to quantify reliability and validity (CMC, ICC, r, CV, SEM, criterion, and contract validity). The majority of studies reported high reliability estimates (0.75-0.99). In one case, ICC of 0.06 was reported for dynamic activity. Evidence of validity of ultrasonography for measuring muscle structure features during contraction was obtained from 7 articles and it was revealed that ultrasonography has high to very high consistency.
Review showes that ultrasonography is a reliable and valid method to measure the changes of skeletal muscle structure during contaction in healthy people and patiants.