O 107 – Impact of subject-specific musculoskeletal geometry on estimated joint kinematics, joint kinetics and muscle forces in typically developing children

Abstract

1.. Introduction: Gait analysis together with musculoskeletal modeling can be used to calculate muscle forces and assess pathological gait [1]. No generic, pediatric musculoskeletal models are available and, therefore, linear scaling methods are commonly used to personalize a generic, adult musculoskeletal model to the child’s anthropometry. 2. Research: How different are joint kinematics, joint kinetics and muscle force estimates of generic scaled models compared to medical-imaging based models in typically developing (TD) children? 3. Methods: 3D motion capture data and magnetic resonance images (MRI) of a TD boy (age: 8 years; height: 1.23 m; weight: 20.4 kg) were collected. Two musculoskeletal OpenSim models were created: (1) a scaled generic model (M_gen), and (2) a MRI-based model, which included subject-specific musculoskeletal geometry (M_mri) [2]. Joint kinematics, joint kinetics and muscle forces were calculated for each model using OpenSim 3.3 [3]. Joint kinematics, joint kinetics, muscle force waveforms, as well as femoral anteversion angle, neck-shaft angle and hip joint centre location were compared between both models. 4. Results: Joint kinematics and joint kinetics were surprisingly similar between the M_gen and M_mri with root-mean-square-differences below 2.8° and 0.05Nm/kg for joint angles and moments, respectively (Fig. 1, Fig. 2). Depending on the analyzed muscle, differences in muscle forces varied substantially (up to 230% difference) between the M_gen and M_mri (Fig. 3). Femoral anteversion and neck-shaft angles differed between M_gen and M_mri by 12 and 5 degrees, respectively. The hip joint centre position differed between both models by 5, 15 and 6 mm in the anterior/posterior, superior/inferior and medial/lateral direction, respectively.