Ground truth and demographic data for ultrasound assessment of thoracolumbar fascia deformation and shearing

Restricted mobility and/or deformability of the thoracolumbar fascia (TLF) could be a diagnostic criterion or a risk factor for the development of low back pain. Therefore, ultrasound measurement techniques to quantify TLF characteristics have been used for over two decades without comprehensive validation. The aim of this paper is to present data to validate ultrasound methods for the assessment of shear, sliding motion and deformation based on distance measurement of anatomical landmarks or speckle tracking. In addition, epidemiological data with deformation values of the TLF are offered. A sliding device with polyurethane tissue phantoms was developed to generate ground truth values for different distances and velocities. The resulting dataset includes 36 ultrasound videos for typical TLF sliding distances of 3–20 mm, 10 videos for various velocities between 2.4 and 5.4 mm/s, demographic data on TLF deformation from 199 individuals, and a MATLAB example script for use with image processing software. For the first time, the dataset provides researchers with ground truth values to validate their ultrasound methods.