Lower body skeletal muscles play an essential role in athletic performance; however, because of the difficulty in obtaining detailed information of each individual muscle, the quantitative relationships between individual muscle volumes and performance are not well studied. The aim of this study was to accurately measure individual muscle volumes and identify the muscles with strong correlations with jump and sprint performance metrics for basketball players. Ten male varsity basketball players and 8 club players were scanned using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and instructed to perform various jump and sprint tests. The volumes of all lower-limb muscles were calculated from MRI and normalized by body surface area to reduce the effect of the body size differences. In analysis, feature selection was first used to identify the most relevant muscles, followed by correlation analysis to quantify the relationships between the selected muscles and each performance metric. Vastus medialis and semimembranosus were found to be the most relevant muscles for jump while adductor longus and vastus medialis were selected for sprint. Strong correlations (r = 0.664-0.909) between the selected muscles and associated performance tests were found for varsity players, and moderate correlations (r = -0.203 to 0.635) were found for club players. One possible application is that for well-trained varsity players, a targeted training scheme focusing on the selected muscles may be an effective method to further improve jump and sprint performances.
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