Apr 30, 2019

Webinar: Predictive Simulations to Study the Plantarflexors in Gait Pathologies

Learn about an approach for predicting simulations of walking at a wide range of speeds

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Details

Title:Predictive Simulations to Study the Plantarflexors in Gait Pathologies
Speaker: Carmichael Ong, Stanford University
Time: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time

Abstract

The ankle plantarflexor muscles play an important role in human walking as they provide propulsion during the push-off phase. Deficits in these muscles, such as weakness and contracture, occur commonly in gait pathologies. While these deficits likely contribute to observed kinematic compensations, elucidating their role is difficult due to the often co-occurring biomechanical and neural deficits. Simulations in which kinematics are generated de novo, commonly known as predictive simulations, are well-suited to answer these types of questions as isolated deficits can be systematically introduced into a model. In this webinar, Ong will discuss a framework for predictive simulation, along with the model he and his team used, to generate realistic motions of walking at a wide range of speeds. Ong will then discuss how they systematically introduced plantarflexor weakness and contracture into their model and analyzed the resulting gait patterns. The model and results are provided at https://simtk.org/projects/pfdeficitsgait. The framework and workflow developed for this study can be extended to study other mechanisms of gait pathologies.

A preprint titled "Predicting gait adaptations due to ankle plantarflexor muscle weakness and contracture using physics-based musculoskeletal simulations" provides more details of the study and is available on bioRxiv.

SCONE is the software framework used in the study, and it can be downloaded at http://scone.software. Results and files needed to recreate the study are available at https://simtk.org/projects/pfdeficitsgait.