Morphological detection of neurogenic muscle disorders: how can statistical methods aid diagnosis?

The light microscopical observation of groups of histochemically similar muscle fibres, referred to as fibre-type grouping, is commonly considered to be evidence of a denervation and reinnervation process affecting the spinal motor neurons or the peripheral nerves. It can be difficult to assess whether such groups have occurred by chance or are due to a slowly progressive pathological process in an early stage of development. Consequently, there is a need for one or more objective methods for assessing the fibre-type arrangement in healthy and diseased human muscles. The purposes here are to review the methods for the detection of fibre-type grouping that have been published in the last two decades, to describe some unsolved problems, and to indicate some likely lines of development.