Scattering of ultrasound from skeletal muscle tissue.

The purpose of this work was to explore the mechanisms which are responsible for the scattering of ultrasound from skeletal muscle tissue. It was undertaken in response to an interesting phenomenon observed in the authors' laboratory whereby scattering power from avian skeletal muscle changed in concordance with passive stretch. Ultrasonic scattering from skeletal muscle samples was measured as they were stretched passively in increments of 10% of their original length up to 40%. The samples were illuminated with an ultrasound beam from a transducer which was oriented orthogonally to and at 20 degrees from the normal to the long axis of the muscle sample. It was found that the integrated backscatter increased significantly over the strain range for the orthogonal orientation, but it changed very little after the initial stretch when the orientation was 20 degrees . It is postulated that this phenomenon may be caused by reorientation of the endomysial collagen fibers surrounding each muscle fiber.