An investigation into the viability of image processing for the measurement of sarcomere length in isolated cardiac trabeculae

A preliminary investigation was performed into the viability of using frequency domain image processing techniques to determine sarcomere length from bright-field images of isolated cardiac trabecula in real-time. Hardware based data processing was used to compute the average sarcomere length in a cardiac trabecula undergoing stretch. Our technique estimated the increase in mean sarcomere length with increasing muscle length as the trabecula was stretched to and beyond the normal physiological limit of 2.4 μm. The standard error in the mean sarcomere length extracted from each image was typically10 nm.