The relationship between rubrospinal tract structure and ankle plantarflexor muscle stiffness in children with Cerebral Palsy

Abstract

We aimed to study the structure of the rubrospinal tract (RuST) and stiffness of muscles of lower extremities in Cerebral Palsy (CP) children and understand the contribution of the structure of the RuST to spasticity of these muscles.Twenty-six spastic CP children of age 4-15 years old participated. The structure of this tract was characterized using the parameters extracted from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). These parameters included fractional anisotropy (FA), and mean diffusivity (MD). To quantify the stiffness of the tibialis anterior (TA) and the gastrocnemius (Gs) muscles, some features of the texture analysis of the region of interest (ROI) in real-time sonoelastography (RTSE) images, including shear wave velocity (SWV), contrast, autocorrelation, correlation, energy, and entropy were extracted.We used Pearson correlation coefficients to find the relationships between the texture of muscles and RuST structure. The results showed some significant relationships between autocorrelation, entropy, and energy of Gs muscle and FA and MD of RuST. It means that RuST may have a role in the Gs muscle function which is an extensor muscle. © 2024 IEEE.