Influence of muscle phenotype on local capillary supply.

The general method used to compute a local capillary fibre ratio for each fibre is as follows. The selected area of the section is covered by a tessellation of domains. For each fibre, the contribution of each capillary whose domain intersects the fibre is computed as the proportion of the domain area which overlaps the fibre. The sum of all the contributions from overlapping domains is taken to be the effective number of capillaries contributing to that fibre, and is called here the local capillary fibre ratio (LCFR). This parameter may be normalised by dividing by fibre area to give an index, independent of fibre size, which is capable of identifying the differential capillary supply to fibre types within a mixed muscle.