Alterations in Muscle Coordination to Reduce Knee Joint Loading for People with Limb Loss.

Purpose: People with unilateral transtibial amputation experienced a higher incidence of knee osteoarthritis due to abnormal movement patterns. This study aimed to explore alternations in muscle coordination to reduce mechanical burdens in their daily activities.

Methods: Five males with unilateral transtibial amputation were recruited.

Biomechanical analysis of combi-hole locking compression plate during fracture healing: A numerical study of screw configuration.

Locking compression plates (LCPs) have become a widely used option for treating femur bone fractures. However, the optimal screw configuration with combi-holes remains a subject of debate. The study aims to create a time-dependent finite element (FE) model to assess the impacts of different screw configurations on LCP fixation stiffness and healing efficiency across four healing stages during a complete fracture healing process.

Gait Intention Prediction Using a Lower-Limb Musculoskeletal Model and Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks.

The prediction of gait motion intention is essential for achieving intuitive control of assistive devices and diagnosing gait disorders. To reduce the cost associated with using multimodal signals and signal processing, we proposed a novel method that integrates machine learning with musculoskeletal modelling techniques for the prediction of time-series joint angles, using only kinematic signals. Additionally, we hypothesised that a stacked long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network architecture can perform the task without relying on any ahead-of-motion features typically provided by electromyography signals.

The effect of muscle atrophy in people with unilateral transtibial amputation for three activities: Gait alone does not tell the whole story.

Amputation imposes significant challenges in locomotion to millions of people with limb loss worldwide. The decline in the use of the residual limb results in muscle atrophy that affects musculoskeletal dynamics in daily activities. The aim of this study was to quantify the lower limb muscle volume discrepancy based on magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and to combine this with motion analysis and musculoskeletal modelling to quantify the effects in the dynamics of key activities of daily living.

A Hybrid Method Integrating A Musculoskeletal Model with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) for Human Motion Prediction.

So far, it shows a growing interest in the biomechanics community in the development of wearable technologies and their clinical applications, which enables the diagnosis of movement disorders and design of the rehabilitation interventions. To provide reliable feedback in the human-machine interface for advanced rehabilitation devices, methods to predict motion intention was developed which aim to generate future human motion based on the measured motion. An inertial measurement unit (IMU) is a promising device for motion tracking, with the advantages of low cost and high convenience in sensor placement to measure motion in almost every environment.

Understanding lower limb muscle volume adaptations to amputation.

Amputation of a major limb, and the subsequent return to movement with a prosthesis, requires the development of compensatory strategies to account for the loss. Such strategies, over time, lead to regional muscle atrophy and hypertrophy through chronic under or overuse of muscles compared to uninjured individuals. The aim of this study was to quantify the lower limb muscle parameters of persons with transtibial and transfemoral amputations using high resolution MRI to ascertain muscle volume and to determine regression equations for predicting muscle volume using femur- and tibia-length, pelvic-width, height, and mass.

An Anatomical Atlas-Based Scaling Study for Quantifying Muscle and Hip Joint Contact Forces in Above and Through-Knee Amputees Using Validated Musculoskeletal Modelling.

Objective: Customisation of musculoskeletal modelling using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) significantly improves the model accuracy, but the process is time consuming and computationally intensive. This study hypothesizes that linear scaling to a lower limb amputee model with anthropometric similarity can accurately predict muscle and joint contact forces.

Methods: An MRI-based anatomical atlas, comprising 18 trans-femoral and through-knee traumatic lower limb amputee models, is developed.

Higher knee contact forces might underlie increased osteoarthritis rates in high functioning amputees: A pilot study.

High functioning military transtibial amputees (TTAs) with well-fitted state of the art prosthetics have gait that is indistinguishable from healthy individuals, yet they are more likely to develop knee osteoarthritis (OA) of their intact limbs. This contrasts with the information at the knees of the amputated limbs that have been shown to be at a significantly reduced risk of pain and OA. The hypothesis of this study is that biomechanics can explain the difference in knee OA risk.

A Femoral Clamp to Reduce Soft Tissue Artifact: Accuracy and Reliability in Measuring Three-Dimensional Knee Kinematics During Gait.

The accurate measurement of full six degrees-of-freedom (6DOFs) knee joint kinematics is prohibited by soft tissue artifact (STA), which remains the greatest source of error. The purpose of this study was to present and assess a new femoral clamp to reduce STA at the thigh. It was hypothesized that the device can preserve the natural knee joint kinematics pattern and outperform a conventional marker mounted rigid cluster during gait.

Computational identification of protein-protein interactions in model plant proteomes.

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) play essential roles in many biological processes. A PPI network provides crucial information on how biological pathways are structured and coordinated from individual protein functions. In the past two decades, large-scale PPI networks of a handful of organisms were determined by experimental techniques.

Extra excitation of biceps femoris during neuromuscular electrical stimulation reduces knee medial loading.

Medial knee joint osteoarthritis (OA) is a debilitating and prevalent condition. Surgical treatment consists of redistributing the forces from the medial to the lateral compartment through osteotomy, or replacing the joint surfaces. As the mediolateral load distribution is related to the action of the musculature around the knee, the aim of this study was to devise a technique to redistribute these forces non-surgically through changes in muscle excitation.

Improving Musculoskeletal Model Scaling Using an Anatomical Atlas: The Importance of Gender and Anthropometric Similarity to Quantify Joint Reaction Forces.

Objective: The accuracy of a musculoskeletal model relies heavily on the implementation of the underlying anatomical dataset. Linear scaling of a generic model, despite being time and cost efficient, produces substantial errors as it does not account for gender differences and inter-individual anatomical variations. The hypothesis of this study is that linear scaling to a musculoskeletal model with gender and anthropometric similarity to the individual subject produces similar results to the ones that can be obtained from a subject-specific model.

Deep Learning for Musculoskeletal Force Prediction.

Musculoskeletal models permit the determination of internal forces acting during dynamic movement, which is clinically useful, but traditional methods may suffer from slowness and a need for extensive input data. Recently, there has been interest in the use of supervised learning to build approximate models for computationally demanding processes, with benefits in speed and flexibility. Here, we use a deep neural network to learn the mapping from movement space to muscle space.

Analysis of Protein Complexes in the Unicellular Cyanobacterium Cyanothece ATCC 51142.

The unicellular cyanobacterium Cyanothece ATCC 51142 is capable of oxygenic photosynthesis and biological N fixation (BNF), a process highly sensitive to oxygen. Previous work has focused on determining protein expression levels under different growth conditions. A major gap of our knowledge is an understanding on how these expressed proteins are assembled into complexes and organized into metabolic pathways, an area that has not been thoroughly investigated.

Validation and Use of a Musculoskeletal Gait Model to Study the Role of Functional Electrical Stimulation.

Objective: Musculoskeletal modeling has been used to predict the effect of functional electrical stimulation (FES) on the mechanics of the musculoskeletal system. However, validation of the resulting muscle activations due to FES is challenging as conventional electromyography (EMG) recording of signals from the stimulated muscle is affected by stimulation artefacts. A validation approach using a combination of musculoskeletal modeling and EMG was proposed, whereby the effect on nonstimulated muscles is assessed using both techniques.

Computing and Visualizing Gene Function Similarity and Coherence with NaviGO.

Gene ontology (GO) is a controlled vocabulary of gene functions across all species, which is widely used for functional analyses of individual genes and large-scale proteomic studies. NaviGO is a webserver for visualizing and quantifying the relationship and similarity of GO annotations. Here, we walk through functionality of the NaviGO webserver ( http://kiharalab.

Computational Methods for Predicting Protein-Protein Interactions Using Various Protein Features.

Understanding protein-protein interactions (PPIs) in a cell is essential for learning protein functions, pathways, and mechanism of diseases. PPIs are also important targets for developing drugs. Experimental methods, both small-scale and large-scale, have identified PPIs in several model organisms.

Activation of biceps femoris long head reduces tibiofemoral anterior shear force and tibial internal rotation torque in healthy subjects.

The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) provides resistance to tibial internal rotation torque and anterior shear at the knee. ACL deficiency results in knee instability. Optimisation of muscle contraction through functional electrical stimulation (FES) offers the prospect of mitigating the destabilising effects of ACL deficiency.

NaviGO: interactive tool for visualization and functional similarity and coherence analysis with gene ontology.

Background: The number of genomics and proteomics experiments is growing rapidly, producing an ever-increasing amount of data that are awaiting functional interpretation. A number of function prediction algorithms were developed and improved to enable fast and automatic function annotation. With the well-defined structure and manual curation, Gene Ontology (GO) is the most frequently used vocabulary for representing gene functions.

Non-linear scaling of a musculoskeletal model of the lower limb using statistical shape models.

Accurate muscle geometry for musculoskeletal models is important to enable accurate subject-specific simulations. Commonly, linear scaling is used to obtain individualised muscle geometry. More advanced methods include non-linear scaling using segmented bone surfaces and manual or semi-automatic digitisation of muscle paths from medical images.

In Vivo Knee Contact Force Prediction Using Patient-Specific Musculoskeletal Geometry in a Segment-Based Computational Model.

Segment-based musculoskeletal models allow the prediction of muscle, ligament, and joint forces without making assumptions regarding joint degrees-of-freedom (DOF). The dataset published for the "Grand Challenge Competition to Predict in vivo Knee Loads" provides directly measured tibiofemoral contact forces for activities of daily living (ADL). For the Sixth Grand Challenge Competition to Predict in vivo Knee Loads, blinded results for "smooth" and "bouncy" gait trials were predicted using a customized patient-specific musculoskeletal model.