Prosthetic disc projects

Christian Wong, MD, PhD, a surgeon at the Hospital of Naestved, Denmark, has recently been awarded funding for research on disc prosthesis vs. rigidifying surgery using the AnyBody Modeling System™ combined with finite element modeling.

Disc prosthetics are becoming more popular, mainly because surgical procedure leaves the patients with excessive loads on the adjacent vertebrae. Rigidifying procedures on the spine too often leaves the patient with reduced freedom of movement as well.

However, implanting disc prostheses is at the moment risky business, due to the lack of knowledge on how, especially, lumbar prostheses would effect the surrounding tissue if not properly implanted. Since it would be non-ethical to test this on both animals and humans, a suitable research should be done by computer simulation.

With AnyBody, Christian Wong can simulate any placement of a disc prosthetic and calculate the output of forces, hereby omitting the scenario of leaving many patients in pain due to adverse side effects of untested surgical procedures.

Read about another prosthetic disc project conducted by Dr. Mark de Zee here.

Coupling simulation software tools for implants

For designing implants, Ansys and AnyBody can be coupled to provide a realistic and reliable prediction of medical device performance. The MD&DI Medical Device Link which is an online information source for the medical device industry features an article by Metin Ozen and coworkers Simulation Software for Biomedical Implant Design.

Read it here.

Upcoming webcasts 

• 29 Jan - Validation of Hip Joint Force Simulation by Gait Analysis
  Speaker: Catherine Manders, University of Southampton, UK
• 19 Feb - Cross-country skiing biomechanics using measurement driven full-body simulations
  Speaker: Joakim Holmberg, Mid-Sweden University, Sweden

Many previous webcasts are available for download and replay here.

Tips and tricks #12: Output for FE models

Many users working with FE models have requests about how to obtain muscle forces as individual force vectors, which can be applied to FE models.

This is a link to a simple model with one segment and two muscles. It produces an output file which contains a force vector for each muscle. The force vector is given in the local coordinate system of the segment, but other options are possible. The procedure shown in this example can easily be applied on the body models in the repository. In this way, it is the user that will decide which muscle forces are of interest.

View the source code of this example here.

Muscle wrapping

Very few scientists around the world are working on the challenging problem of correct representation of muscle wrapping.

Although specialized, the topic is important for any reasonable modeling of the musculoskeletal system, so some of us got together a while ago and formed a Yahoo group for discussion of the issue. Prof. John Rasmussen, The AnyBody Group, Dept. of Mech. Eng., Aalborg University, would like to invite everybody interested to join the discussions. The group can be found at this address.

Meet an AnyBuddy:
Arne Kiis

Arne Kiis, 48, heads sales and marketing. He left Aarhus University in 1986 with a MSc in biology and a BSc in computer science. Subsequently he worked as an applied statistics and thermodynamics simulation consultant. Later he became a system programmer and a technical consultant focusing on system software integration and document management systems optimization. In 1999 Arne acquired a Business Diploma/MBA from Aalborg University and switched to sales working for global software vendors delivering technical infrastructure software and business performance management solutions. He joined the AnyBody team in 2004. He enjoys sunrise, marzipan and chocolate and hates snow. His favorite spare time activities are swimming, bicycle racing, running, and bird watching. He is married, has 3 kids and lives in a village 2 km from the office.

AnyBody publication

J. Wu, K. An, R. Cutlip, K. Krajnak, D. Welcome, R. Dong (2008): Analysis of musculoskeletal loading in an index finger during tapping. Journal of Biomechanics (in press).

A. Nolte, P. Augat (2007): Untersuchung der Muskel- und Gelenkkräfte im Schultergelenk mithilfe eines Simulationsmodells der Software AnyBody. Diplomarbeit, Biomechanisches Forschungslabor der Berufsgenossenschaftliche Unfallklinik Murnau und der Paracelsus Medizinischen Privatuniversität Salzburg; In Zusammenarbeit mit der Firma CADFEM GmbH, Grafing b. München.

M.S. Andersen, M. Damsgaard, J. Rasmussen, (2007): A study of The Effects of Two Different Kinematical Analysis Methods on the Calculated Muscle Activities in an Inverse Dynamics-based Musculoskeletal Model of Gait. 20th Nordic Seminar on Computational Mechanics, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Events: Meet AnyBody at...

World Congress on Neck Pain,
Jan 20-22, Los Angeles, CA

Innovative Seating Conference,
Feb 11-14, Frankfurt, Germany

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Sincerely
The AnyBody Team.