Abstract
The musculoskeletal system (or MSS) is essential for the performance of day-to-day functional tasks and thus leading a quality life. MSS pathologies can therefore have a significant impact on our daily life. The MSS is also involved in central nervous conditions (e.g., brain stroke, cerebral palsy, spinal cord damages, etc.) and is sensitive to cardiovascular disorders. Such conditions can lead to severe impairments of the MSS normal physiology, leading to severe disabilities. It is therefore not surprising to find MSS-related health problems at the top of global statistics on professional absenteeism or societal health costs (see The Burden of Musculoskeletal Diseases in the United States, AAOS). Recently, a couple of papers by Lozano et al. and Murray et al. published in The Lancet reported results from a large comprehensive study about the worldwide impact of all major diseases and risk factors on disability and mortality; this study found “that musculoskeletal conditions affect more than 1.7 billion people worldwide and have the fourth greatest impact on the overall health of the world population, considering both death and disability (DALYs).” The same study also stated that musculoskeletal-related disorders have increased by 45% over the past 20 years and will continue to increase unless appropriate preventive action is taken. Despite the widely recognized important role of MSS in our daily functions and in maintaining quality of life, the current fundamental knowledge related to the individual components of the MSS architecture remains relatively limited. This limited knowledge with a lack of standardized data representation often proves insufficient in systems engineering and modeling applications. This limitation is a major obstacle in the progress of fundamental and applied research today. Efforts in bioengineering and biomechanics are needed to improve current simulation methods through a better integration of functional anatomy knowledge with improved and well-described system modeling. In fundamental research on MSS architecture, more effort should be devoted to gathering reliable statistical data on the architecture of each single muscle and quantify anatomical variations in the human species. This chapter focuses on compiling all the knowledge available on MSS architecture and presents the details with the aim of facilitating further research and bridging the gap between literature and current knowledge. It also presents a wider picture of several challenges lying ahead and tasks to be performed to achieve the goals of gaining objective fundamental knowledge on all MSS components in order to develop clinically useful MSS models.
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