Take the kinds of movie techniques that allow animation with true-life action, throw in an anatomically-based muscle, ligament, tendon, bone and soft-tissue geometries dataset, and add individual patient MRI or CT scan data.
What you have is a powerful tool to direct and then check surgical procedures, with the potential to study the effects of drug therapy and disease on a specific physiological system and throughout the body.
In the knee/patella area, researchers at the Auckland University Bioengineering Institute developed a patella articulation knee computer model that successfully showed reductions in kneecap strain that matched earlier literature. Two studies involved corrective procedures to reduce cartilage stress and another assessed literature on surgical outcomes of muscle length changes for children with cerebral palsy.
The work done by Justin W. Fernandez and Peter J. Hunter in Auckland, New Zealand is part of the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS) Physiome Project, which helped develop the modeling framework to investigate soft tissue and general musculo-skeletal problems. Using the physical geometries and characteristic responses of tissues to loading, computers calculate the forces and contact stresses at the joints, a patient-specific profile is generated using morphing techniques based on the individual’s magnetic resonance or computed tomography data.
*Paper presentation: “An anatomically based patient specific model of patella articulation: Towards a diagnostic tool,” 12:30 p.m.-3 p.m. Tuesday April 5, Physiology session/abstract: 902.15; board #A15. On view 7:30 a.m. - 4 p.m. Hunter is presenting the research at the 35th Congress of the IUPS in San Diego, March 31 - April 5, 2005. Prior to the IUPS Congress, the Physiome Project will hold a satellite meeting in San Diego, March 28-30, “Computational physiology: from genome to physiome.”
Reducing cartilage stress points: toward future applications in diagnosis