Static and dynamic sonography of facial muscles in healthy subjects – Impact of the process of manual muscle segmentation on inter-observer-reliability

Purpose: Identifying the impact of manual segmentation on the reliability of static and dynamic ultrasound measurements of facial muscles. The inter-observer-reliability (for scanning and manual segmenting by two independent observers) in recent studies has shown good results in area measurements (intra class coefficient (ICC)/median: 0.960 – 0.997/0.98), but high variability in longitudinal and cross-diameter (0 – 0.954/0.83 Sauer, 2014). The aim of this study was to figure out the impact of the muscle-segmentation on the ICC in contrast to the impact of the ultrasound scans. Material and methods: Bilateral sca…