Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical

Engineering: Imaging & Visualization

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Leveraging artificial neural networks to mesh frog

gastrocnemius muscle from digital photography

Fethi Okyar, Volkan Karadag, Mehmet Akgun & Namik Ciblak

To cite this article: Fethi Okyar, Volkan Karadag, Mehmet Akgun & Namik Ciblak (2019):
Leveraging artificial neural networks to mesh frog gastrocnemius muscle from digital photography,
Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging & Visualization, DOI:
10.1080/21681163.2019.1627677

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Published online: 27 Jun 2019.

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COMPUTER METHODS IN BIOMECHANICS AND BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING: IMAGING & VISUALIZATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/21681163.2019.1627677

Leveraging artificial neural networks to mesh frog gastrocnemius muscle from

digital photography
Fethi Okyar , Volkan Karadag , Mehmet Akgun and Namik Ciblak
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yeditepe University, Atasehir, Turkey

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

There has been a lot of development in realistic muscle modeling based on finite elements in the last Received 27 October 2018
decade. However, one of the challenges in this area remains to be custom or specimen-specific Accepted 2 June 2019
meshing of the relevant muscle, mainly due to the scarcity of the DT-MRI infrastructure and expertise. KEYWORDS
The purpose of this work is to capitalize on the Bayesian regularization backpropagation based artificial Finite element; meshing;
neural networks, to transform digital photographic imagery into a finite element mesh, and the muscle; fiber orientations;
accompanying internal fiber orientation data. A gastrocnemius muscle was extracted from a frog and artificial neural networks;
utilized to conduct the proposed work. Due to the highly nonlinear nature of the resulting finite subject-specific
element model, from both metric and material considerations, as well as the limited suitability of
available elements for meshing in this case, a custom hexahedral-type mesh topology was selected for
the meshing procedure. Results indicate a very good agreement between the geometries of the sample
muscle and its mesh. Furthermore, fiber orientations were approximated as following the fusiform
geometry of the muscle. The proposed framework can be used to overcome the pre-processing
requirements of subject-specific muscles, including hexahedral-type meshing and extraction of internal
fiber orientation data.

1. Introduction works especially from the computer graphics community con-

tributing to the automatic all-hexahedral meshing problem
Motion of vertebrates is provided by their skeletal musculature.
(Gregson et al. 2011; Livesu et al. 2013). Alternatively, application
Biomechanical models for studying motion involve musculo-
of artificial intelligence methods to the field of finite elements
skeletal elements that have complex geometries and can usually
was first considered by Rheinboldt (1981) who developed an
be dealt with using a computational approach. These models are
adaptive refinement process. Automatic mesh generation
governed by coupled electro-mechano-chemical partial differen-
based on artificial intelligence has also been proposed by
tial equations and involve constitutive relations of the muscle
a variety of authors since then (Kang and Haghighi 1995;
constituents that are highly-nonlinear. The problem domain is
Manevitz et al. 1997; Dolšak 2002). But all of these methods rely
generally irregular, belonging to a biological tissue. For this rea-
on existing CAD geometries to begin with.
son, many of the computational studies on muscle contraction
The aim of this study is to propose a custom mesh generation
have utilized domain discretization in order to comply with the
procedure based on digital photography of the model and lever-
finite element (FE) method. Most of such current works are based
aged by artificial neural networks. Artificial neural networks
on three-dimensional elements (Böl and Reese 2008; Kockova
(Daniel 2013) are widely used nowadays in image processing,
and Cimrman 2009; Tang et al. 2009; Böl 2010; Vavourakis et al.
pattern recognition and a whole range of other applications
2014), while in some other studies two-dimensional elements
(Nayak et al. 2001; Peng et al. 2010). Also known as deep-
have also been used (Gielen et al. 2000; Yucesoy et al. 2002;
learning algorithms, neural networks yield an alternative solution
Martins et al. 2006).
approach for highly nonlinear problems or problems that are not
Factors such as element type and mesh quality are known to
well-posed. In this study, an artificial neural-network based custom
predominate convergence behavior of the numerical scheme,
mesh generator which maps a unit cylindrical volume onto the
specifically in problems involving geometric as well as material
muscle model has been developed. The mesh generator receives
non-linearities (Zienkiewicz et al. 2014). Although there is recent
the digital muscle images as input and generates an orderly set of
work dealing with numerical problems resulting from the use of
hexahedral-type element mesh as output.
tetrahedral elements such as volumetric locking and checker-
Apart from convergence difficulties associated with the
board instabilities (Joldes et al. 2009; Onishi and Amaya 2014),
present nonlinearities, there are two other issues one needs
hexahedral type elements due to their consistent numerical
to take into account. First, the muscle tissue is transversely
behaviour seem to be the choice in the majority of studies in
isotropic due to its fiber-reinforced structure. This can be dealt
this field (Oomens et al. 2003; Tsui et al. 2004; Blemker et al. 2005;
with by adopting fiber-reinforced material models and by
Liang et al. 2006; Tang et al. 2007; Röhrle et al. 2008; Kockova and
identifying the material properties of the fiber and matrix
Cimrman 2009; Böl 2010). There have been several other recent
phases separately. The second issue, which is more serious in

CONTACT Fethi Okyar okyar@yeditepe.edu.tr Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yeditepe University, Atasehir, Istanbul 34755, Turkey
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 F. OKYAR ET AL.
terms of structural modeling is that the internal fiber architec-
ture is not generally unidirectional. The state-of-the-art tech-
nology for obtaining internal architecture, diffusion tensor
magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI, Mukherjee et al.
(2008)), is very expensive, requires expert technicians to use
and is only available at selected research facilities. This poses
a great challenge hindering the possibility of obtaining impor-
tant structural data. However, as stated in Tang et al. (2009),
fiber orientations and their geometrical arrangements are
important for adequate simulation of nonuniform stress and
strain distributions.
Thus, the second aim of this study is to further utilize the
trained artificial neural network for generating a field of fiber
orientations based on the assumption that they may be dis-
persed evenly between the central axis and the fusiform out-
line. The relevant procedures will be explained in the next
section. The custom mesh generator was tested on a frog’s
gastrocnemius. The resulting mesh and respective fiber orien-
tations are given as a proof-of-concept in the Results. The
performance of the custom mesh generator and challenges
lying around fully three-dimensional continuum based models
are further elaborated in the Discussion.
In summary, the paper describes a procedure whereby the
geometry of a muscle is extracted from simple digital photo-
graphy images, boundaries of which are then smoothed and
subsequently used to train a neural network. In the final step
a mesh is generated for the muscle via the trained network,
ready to be used for finite element analysis of the muscle
behavior.
2. Surface modeling and mesh generation
The material of interest was biological tissue, the gastrocnemius
muscle, also known as the plantaris longus. This muscle lies
between the knee and ankle joints (Duellman and Trueb 1994).
It has a fusiform geometry with larger cross-sectional area in the
proximity of the knee joint. It gets slimmer distally and is terminally
connected to the Achilles tendon as shown in Figure 1.
A frog (code M36L within the larger scope of the project),
weighing 62.6 g, was decapitated and its spinal cord was des-
tructed, followed by excision of its left gastrocnemius muscle to
be used as a model. Use of frogs was approved by Yeditepe
University Ethics Committee. The muscle’s length, it’s largest
transverse diameter and mass were recorded as 30.7 mm,
10.0 mm, and 1.93 g, respectively. Using this model, a finite
Figure 1. The dorsal view of frog M36L. The gastrocnemius is ready to be excised.
element mesh of the muscle was generated following the four-
step methodology shown in Figure 2.
2.1. Digital photography and image processing
In the first step, the sample was submerged vertically into an
aqueous transparent bath as shown in Figure 3. The muscle
was suspended from the shaft of a DC motor at its knee-end,
which was operated by an in-house control unit, and illumi-
nated from behind. An Arduino-based controller unit was
designed and built to synchronize the light switch, shaft axis
rotation and camera capture. After an image was obtained,
the muscle in the solution was rotated about its own axis by
a fixed amount. 14 consecutively numbered images, as shown
in Figure 4, were obtained during a complete cycle.
Subsequently, image processing operations were con-
ducted using MATLAB (2015) image processing toolbox. The
operation order followed length calibration, cropping to size,
thresholding, and finally detection of the left and right con-
tours of the muscle model. In some images the light source
appeared close to a contour of the muscle that made the edge
look blurry, while in some others the bone holder on the knee
side covered the muscle. For these instances manual interven-
tion was used to repair edge detection faults.
2.2. Data conversion
Nearly 2800 discrete data points (pixels) were obtained per
contour per digital image. The jagged curves in Figure 5 show
these data points for the left and right contours of an image.
These discrete data were then smoothed by fitting
a polynomial of the type,
rK ðzÞ ¼ aKn zn þ aKn1 zn1 þ . . . þ aK0 (1)
rKþ1 ðzÞ ¼ anKþ1 zn þ aKþ1
n1 z
n1
þ . . . þ aKþ1
0 (2)
where rK ðzÞ is the radial coordinate of a point on the K th contour,
K ¼ 2J  1, denotes the contour item number, z is the axial
coordinate, and n is the selected interpolating polynomial order.
Note that, there are two contour equations for each image given
by Equations (1) and (2), and the image number is denoted by
J ¼ 1; . . . ; 14. Each pair of contour curves was assumed to be
planar with an angular coordinate θ J , the corresponding angle
of frame J.
The interpolating polynomials were then used to generate
as many input data points for the training of the artificial
neural network as necessary. A sufficiently smooth polynomial
with the lowest possible order was found based on the esti-
mation error.
2.3. Artificial neural network model
Neurons, the fundamental building blocks of neural networks, are
single-input single-output processing units. Neurons are grouped
to form layers and layers are stacked to form a network as shown
in Figure 6. Neurons in consecutive network layers are connected
to each other such that the output signals of the preceding layer
are sent as inputs to the neurons in the following layer. This way
 COMPUTER METHODS IN BIOMECHANICS AND BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING: IMAGING & VISUALIZATION 3

Digital photography
(14 instances in one full turn)

Image Processing
(left and right contour extraction)

Data Conversion
(Curve fitting)

Artificial Neural Network

(back-propagation algorithm)

Figure 2. Basic steps outlining the methodology.

a set of input signals received by the first (input) layer is trans-

mitted through the network to yield the output signals at the last
(output) layer. The intermediate layers are also known as hidden
layers. A single neuron thus receives its input(s) from connection(s)
at the preceding layer. The net income is calculated, passed
through an activation function and finally sent as an output to
the following layer. The income calculation consists of summing
the products of inputs, xi , and their corresponding connection
weights, wi , for every incoming connection. A non-zero bias value,
P
b is added to the net income which reads, wi xi þ b. The
weights and bias factors are determined by applying a learning
process.
A three-layer network structure consisting of two hidden
layers and an output layer, as shown in Figure 6, was found to
be satisfactory. The first and second hidden layers were popu-
lated with 5 and 7 neurons, respectively. The weights and bias
factors were determined using a Bayesian regularization back-
propagation based supervised learning process. In Matlab, this
was achieved by the trainbr function. Input and output data
arrays were prepared for the training process.
Inputs were cylindrical coordinates of a grid of 3  14  25
points, represented as fr; θ; zg. The grid was constructed on
the outer surface of a unit radius unit length cylinder defined
Figure 3. The experimental setup designed to capture equally spaced muscle
images. by fr ¼ 1; 0  z  1g. There were 14 distinct angular grid

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Figure 4. Sequential images obtained by the experimental setup.
4 F. OKYAR ET AL.

projection
θJ −plane
plane
depth error
r xr
x̄r xr
right
CL
bone z xc
tendon

xl
left
zN

Figure 5. Illustration of left and right contour fits, and the uncertainty of the sectioning plane in the depth direction.

J , corresponding to the angles at which the images

locations, θ
were captured. In the axial direction, 25 equidistant grid loca-
tions were defined as zN ¼ ðN  1Þ=24. The remaining three
grid locations were the radial positions, r ¼ f1; 0; 1g. The
network was trained using Equations (1) and (2) so that the
twenty-eight longitudinal lines on the surface of the unit
cylinder would be mapped onto the twenty-eight contours
thereby computing the proper weights and bias factors. That
is, each input point was mapped to a corresponding point on
the muscle. The input points lying on the centroidal axis of the
unit cylinder were mapped to points in the neighborhood of
the muscle’s centroidal axis. The fr; θ;  zg coordinates were
transformed into fr; θ; zg by assuming that: (1) the spatial
contours lied almost in the image plane, i.e. for each contour
fθ ¼ θJ "z in ½0; lg, (2) the unit cylinder length scaled linearly
with the muscle length, i.e. z ¼ lz, and 3) the left and right
contour radii were given by rl ðzÞ ¼ rK ðzÞ; rr ðzÞ ¼ rKþ1 ðzÞ and
the centroid passed through rc ¼ ðrl þ rr Þ=2. Finally, fr; θ; zg
were converted into fx; y; zg, according to the rules of con-
version from the cylindrical to Cartesian coordinates.
Input Hidden Hidden Output
layer layer layer layer
2.4. Mesh generation
A simple hexahedral mesh of the unit cylinder was prepared in
FEAP (Taylor 2014). The mesh contained 31 layers along the
axial direction, 16 layers in the circumferential direction, 8
layers through its diagonal, 1767 nodes (three degree-of-
freedom per node) and 1440 Q1P1-type hexahedral solid ele-
ments in total.
The unit cylinder mesh is shown in the lower left of Figure 2.
Nodal points of the unit cylinder were then mapped to the
muscle volume by the trained artificial neural network. The
muscle ended up being meshed with hexahedral elements by
transforming the regular hexahedral mesh of the unit cylinder
which was very easy to generate. Mesh refinement could easily
be achieved by passing a refined hexahedral unit cylinder mesh
through the trained artificial neural network without the need for
additional training or process whatsoever.
2.5. Extraction of local fiber orientation
An approach was devised in order to extend the capability of
the in-house mesh generator to approximate the local fiber
orientation at any given location. With the three dimensional
mapping of the unit cylinder to the muscle geometry resulting
from the supervised learning procedure, longitudinal lines
within the cylinder led to evenly dispersed tangent bundles
between the curvilinear centroidal axis and the fusiform out-
line of the muscle. It was assumed that the tangent orienta-
tion, l at any point P, would be sufficiently close to the fiber
orientation within the muscle. The outlined steps were applied
as a post-processing step and fiber orientations were calcu-
lated at the centroid of each element.

Input r̄ Output x
3. Results
Input θ̄ Output y
In an effort to create the finite element model of an actual
Input z̄ Output z muscle, standard Matlab image processing operations were
used to scale and convert every image into a corresponding
binary image containing the left and right muscle contours.
Fourth-order polynomials were fitted to the pixels defining the
contours (Equations (1) and (2)) using the least-squares
approximation. Coefficients of the 28 polynomials correspond-
Figure 6. Network architecture to estimate the model geometry.
ing to the 28 contours are provided in the Appendix.
 COMPUTER METHODS IN BIOMECHANICS AND BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING: IMAGING & VISUALIZATION
Figure 7. Box-and-whisker diagram showing the variability of contour polynomial fitting error among the image frames. The boxes represent the interquartile range
and the whiskers bracket 98.1% of the data range of observed data across individual contours. Bold horizontal bars represent the median error. The fourth order
polynomials are shown in blue, while the fifth orders are in magenta.
Performance of the fourth order polynomials in terms of
their absolute approximation error along the entire length of
the muscle contour was checked against the fifth order ones.
In Figure 7, the box-plots for all 28 contours are shown. The
errors belonging to the left contours are shown in the upper
graph, while those of the right contours are in the bottom
graph. Image numbers are labeled on the x  axis. The inter-
quartile ranges for the fourth order fits (colored in blue) were
observed to be slightly more than those of the fifth order
(colored in magenta), however, the difference was not signifi-
cant. In the right contours of image numbers 4, 5, and 10, the
scatter of error was found to be larger than others. The poly-
nomial order did not seem to affect the scatter in absolute
error significantly.
The network was trained using a grid of 3  14  25 points
using the Matlab function trainbr. Mean squared error was used as
a performance indicator for the Bayesian regularization backpro-
pagation network. Matlab output statistics of two trained net-
works corresponding to fourth and fifth order approximations
are shown in Figure 8. It took 171 iterations to train the fourth
order model, while 229 iterations were required for the fifth order.
The remaining solution parameters, such as the training perfor-
mance, final gradient value, effective number of parameters and
the squared sum of parameters were very close for both orders. No
apparent benefits of preferring one order over the other were
seen except for the simplicity of the lower order.
The ability of the network to map the external (r ¼ 1) sur-
face of the unit cylinder onto the muscle’s external surface
constitutes the necessary and sufficient condition to fulfill the
5
primary objective of this study. For this purpose, a set of
regularly-spaced grid points were generated on the unit cylin-
der and these points were then fed to the trained network as
inputs. The outputs of these points are shown as blue circles in
Figure 9. Moreover, the internal points lying on r ¼ 0:5 were
mapped onto the point set shown in red, illustrating the net-
work’s internal mapping ability. In an attempt to demonstrate
the fulfillment of the second objective of this study, tiny fibers
were generated along the z  direction on r ¼ 0:75 of the unit
cylinder. By passing their end points through the network they
were mapped onto the muscle geometry, as shown in purple
arrows in Figure 9.
As the final step of the study comprising custom mesh
generation, a unit cylinder mesh consisting of 1767 nodes
and 1440 hexahedral-type elements was passed through the
trained network. The cylinder mesh had been prepared by
using the mesh commands in FEAP. The resulting mesh
obtained from the neural network is shown in Figure 10. The
digital photography and MATLAB source codes required to
train the artificial neural network have been posted in
a public repository (Okyar and Karadag 2018).
4. Discussion
The primary objective of this study was to propose and test
a custom mesh generator that mapped a regular hexahedral
mesh into a frog-specific gastrocnemius muscle volume. The
time and effort required to build such specimen-specific meshes
may be exhaustive even when using modern tools such as DT-MRI
6 F. OKYAR ET AL.
Figure 8. The output statistics of trained artificial networks, obtained from Matlab. The fourth order (a), and fifth order (b) polynomial results are shown.
(Heemskerk et al. 2005; Sinha et al. 2006; Oudeman et al. 2016).
Although there are studies that utilize DT-MRI for the entire
muscle mesh and associated internal fiber orientations such as
Martins et al. (1998); Gielen et al. (2000); Spyrou and Aravas (2011),
they are rare (Siebert et al. 2015) and expensive. Moreover, in most
of these studies a tetrahedral mesh was generated. Alternatively,
in a considerable portion of finite element studies that deal with
the modeling of muscles (Tsui et al. 2004; Blemker et al. 2005;
Liang et al. 2006; Tang et al. 2007; Böl and Reese 2008; Kockova
and Cimrman 2009; Vavourakis et al. 2014), idealized muscle
geometries were preferred over the DT-MRI approach, mainly for
their simplicity. However, an actual muscle geometry may deviate
significantly from idealized shapes. Thus, a cheaper and easier way
to construct a specimen-specific muscle model was deemed
necessary for research purposes.
The custom mesh generator described herein consisted of an
artificial neural network trained with the muscle contour data
obtained from digital photography. From each and every image,
the outlining muscle contours were extracted and converted into
analytical polynomial expressions. These polynomials were used
to generate as many input samples as required during the training
of the artificial neural network. The network parameters con-
verged in several successful runs. Sensitivity of the training process
to the grid variables such as the number of images or the number
of equidistant contour locations was not studied. Training was
stopped when any of the conditions defined in the trainbr func-
tion of Matlab was met. Thus, convergence of network parameters
depended on the default conditions set by trainbr.
An important source of uncertainty in this model was that
the depth of points along the contour (their θ  coordinate)
was uncertain, that is, contours somewhat curled around the
muscle body slightly. There would be no such error for axi-
symmetric objects. In other words, the contours in the image
of an axisymmetric object are always coplanar with the image
plane. Frog gastrocnemius muscle, however, was not exactly
axisymmetric as shown in Figure 5, but the depth uncertainty,
nevertheless, was ignored.
The box-and-whisker diagram in Figure 7 depicts the statis-
tical distribution of the deviations between contour points
(shown with gray in Figure 5) for the fourth and fifth-order
polynomial fits per image as a measure of the overall mesh
accuracy. Uncertainty due to image processing operations such
as thresholding and edge detection was in the order of image
pixels size and was neglected. While the resolution of the unit
cylinder mesh directly impacts the FE solution, it has no effect
over the proposed method’s accuracy and only a single resolu-
tion was used. The impact of other factors such as imaging
methodology (frequency of imaging, precision, etc.) were not
studied. Qualitatively, mesh accuracy could be assessed by
visually inspecting the similarity between the mesh and the
muscle images. Quantitatively, the interquartile regions in
Figure 7 remained below 0.5 mm for all images, an indication
of the likely region of variation, being slightly larger for the
fourth-order fit in comparison with the fifth order. Qualitative
observation also indicated a good overall agreement between
the muscle and its mesh provided in Figure 10. This implied that
neglecting the depth information did not result in a noticeable
modeling error. Moreover, the resulting mesh is made of an
ordered-set of hexahedral-type elements. Clinical relevance is
that this method could be considered an alternative to the
gold standard in mesh construction procedures only if the fiber
distributions can be resolved.
The second objective of this study was thus to extend the
capabilities of the custom mesh generator to approximate local
fiber orientations within the mesh. The fiber arrangement and
orientation show wide variability among different groups of
muscles. The hindlimb muscles of vertebrates have a fusiform
geometry, which has usually been idealized as an axisymmetric
geometry (Tsui et al. 2004; Tang et al. 2007; Böl and Reese 2008;
Kockova and Cimrman 2009; Vavourakis et al. 2014). Under this
idealization, the internal fiber orientations are either assumed
to be fixed, pointing in the axial direction, or they slightly
deviate from the axial direction, following the fusiform outline
of the muscle. It was shown by (Tang et al. 2009) that including
 COMPUTER METHODS IN BIOMECHANICS AND BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING: IMAGING & VISUALIZATION
Figure 9. The mapping of the surfaces r ¼ 0:5 (shown with yellow circles), and
r ¼ 1 (blue circles), from the unit cylinder onto the muscle geometry. The purple
lines show the mapping of the unit vectors, k, in the unit cylinder.
fiber orientations and their geometric arrangement were
important for simulating nonuniform stress and strain distribu-
tions. In the case of specimen-specific meshing as in this study,
a procedure to interpolate fiber orientations between the mus-
cle axis and the fusiform outline was judged necessary. The
devised algorithm capitalized on the mapping capabilities of
a trained network. A small line segment was generated in the
unit cylinder domain and its two end points were passed
through the neural network. The line segment joining the two
output points was then assumed to be the associated fiber
orientation in the muscle domain. This procedure was repeated
for each finite element. The fiber orientations obtained this way
were found to follow the fusiform outline of the muscle as
shown in Figure 9. The possible impact of this assumption on
the model behavior and its accuracy remains to be determined
7
Figure 10. The final mesh obtained by passing the nodes of the unit cylinder
mesh through the trained network, from two opposite perspectives.
by additional FE analyses. The mechanical response of muscle
models and comparison of various fiber dispersion models
including unidirectional and fusiform assumptions will be
reported elsewhere.
The study of muscle contraction using fully three-
dimensional continuum based models is an active research
topic, attracting the attention of medical professionals as
well as biomechanicians. The balance of momentum equa-
tions is geometrically nonlinear and they are coupled with
the activation dynamics of contraction. Muscle constituents
have nonlinear constitutive behavior, and they are incompres-
sible with a fiber-reinforced micro-structure. Each time a new
specimen is to be modeled, these computationally challenging
issues are added to the challenge of creating a regular hex-
ahedral-type mesh within the muscle domain. The unavailabil-
ity of DT-MRI infrastructure and expertise greatly hinders the
construction of a specimen-specific mesh along with its fiber
orientation data. This work describes a procedure for obtain-
ing a mesh and its associated data from digital photography,
capitalizing on the application of a Matlab-based, Bayesian
regularization backpropagation type supervised learning pro-
cess. Upon FE verification, the proposed procedure could
prove as a viable alternative to the standard pipeline consist-
ing of segmenting muscles and augmenting muscle fiber
orientations based on DT-MRI findings.
8 F. OKYAR ET AL.
5. Conclusion
Artificial intelligence methods, such as artificial neural networks,
are finding increasing use in the modeling/diagnosis of biologi-
cal organs including muscles. The primary objective of this study
was to utilize artificial neural networks in order to devise
a muscle mesh generator based on images taken with simple
digital photography. The second objective was to see whether
the previously trained network, could be used to generate a fiber
field that followed the muscle’s fusiform geometry. Both of these
objectives were successfully met. From a computational aspect,
the proposed custom mesh generator has the potential to
become an alternative to the standard pipeline procedures
used in meshing biological tissues.
Acknowledgments
We thank Ozancan Saribas (B.Sc.), Berat Gulec (B.Sc.), and Sena Sahin (B.Sc) for
their contributions as part of their undergraduate engineering project topic.
All husbandry and experimental protocols were approved by the
Yeditepe University Ethics of Animal Care and Use Board.
This study was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research
Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) grant number 114M574; principal
investigator M.A.Akgun. We would like to express our gratitude to TUBITAK.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by the Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştirma
Kurumu [114M574].
Notes on contributors
Fethi Okyar obtained a B.Sc. degree in mechanical engineering from the
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, in 1993. He then obtained a
master's (1995) and a Ph.D. (2000) degree both in mechanical and aero-
space engineering program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago,
IL, U.S.A. He is currently working as an assistant professor in the depart-
ment of mechanical engineering at the Yeditepe University, Istanbul
Turkey. His Ph.D. dissertation was on computational fracture mechanics
in thermally loaded film coatings on metallic substrates. His expertise
areas include parametric CAD modeling, nonlinear finite element analysis
of solids and design of biomedical systems and implants.
Volkan Karadag completed his undergraduate and MSc education from
Mechanical Engineering at Yeditepe University in 2011 and 2015. His BSc
work is on Modeling, Simulation and Testing of a Biped Robot with Joint
Actuator Dynamics and his MSc is on Piezoelectric Vibration Energy
Harvester with Movable Tip Mass. He is currently a PhD degree candidate
at the same institution. After his internship at Erdemir Engineering
Management and Consulting Services Inc. he worked as project researcher
for several TUBITAK funded projects while his MSc and early PhD studies.
Mehmet Akgun received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering
from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He received his
Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque, NM, USA, in 1985. The same year he joined Aerospace
Engineering Department of the Middle East Technical University as an
assistant professor where he served for 19 years. In 2005 he transferred to
the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Yeditepe University,
Istanbul, Turkey, where he has been a full professor since then.
Namik Ciblak received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical
Engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. In
1998, he received his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology
(Georgia Tech), Atlanta, GA, USA. After receiving his doctoral degree, he
worked as an R&D engineer for The Panasonic Research Laboratories,
Research Triangle, NC, USA, for a short while, working on the analysis
and simulation of a high precision, six degree-of-freedom parallel robot.
From Sep-1998 to Dec-2001, he served as a faculty member of the
Mechanical Engineering Technology program of the Georgia Southern
University, Statesboro, GA, USA. For the next three years, he was
employed as an R&D and design engineer at U.S. Welding Systems
(Later, Aquilex Corp.), Atlanta, GA, USA. In 2004, he joined the faculty of
the department of mechanical engineering of the Yeditepe University,
Istanbul, Turkey. Among his research interests are mechanics, kinematics,
and robotics; design of machine elements and mechanical system design;
and, engineering and applied mathematics.
ORCID
Fethi Okyar http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2561-7547
Volkan Karadag http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4928-0803
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