Webinar: Interfacing Musculoskeletal & Finite Element Models to Study Bone Structure & Adaptation

Musculoskeletal models can be used to simulate human motion and study the muscle and joint reaction forces occurring during various activities. The predicted internal forces can in turn be applied as external loads in finite element (FE) models of biological structures, e.g. bone and cartilage, to calculate internal stresses and strains and investigate their behaviour and adaptation in a biofidelic mechanical environment.

In this webinar, Luca Modenese and Andrew Phillips of Imperial College London present their experience in interfacing musculoskeletal models with FE models, describing methodological solutions they have developed to apply force sets from musculoskeletal models to deformable models of bones, including consideration of load application, boundary conditions and an OpenSim plugin to extract muscle force directions. They also present example computational studies where they applied these methodologies to bone structure optimization in the femur and pelvis bones and to the investigation of prenatal biomechanics.

Learn more about topics mentioned during the webinar:
- Plugin to extract the muscle lines of action: https://simtk.org/projects/force_dire...
- Codified procedure and scripts to generate musculoskeletal models from MRI images: https://simtk.org/projects/subj-spec-...
- Open-access research papers with description of the bone adaptation methodology mentioned during the webinar applied to the femur (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1...) and to the pelvis (http://biomechanical.asmedigitalcolle...)
- Open-access research papers describing bone fracture modelling (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...) and a metamodel for bone adaptation (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...)
- Further information can be found at http://www.imperial.ac.uk/structural-...