Tong Wu
Research Mentor: Sujata Khandare
Mentor Department: University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Engineering
Author(s): Tong Wu, Sujata Khandare
Session: Session 6 (3:00 PM – 3:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 138
Abstract
Musculoskeletal modeling is widely used to study human movement and estimate joint loading during sport tasks such as a soccer kick. In many applications, individuals are represented by scaling a generic template model using height and body mass. While efficient, this approach can overlook meaningful variation in lower limb bone geometry across sex, stature, and body shape, which may influence muscle moment arms, joint alignment, and ultimately predicted knee loading. The goal of this study is to quantify how much subject specific bone geometry changes predicted knee joint loading during a standardized soccer instep kick, compared with a conventional scaled generic model. We will build upon an established OpenSim soccer kicking workflow and develop a subject specific model by integrating cadaver imaging derived three dimensional bone geometries. Specifically, the pelvis, femur, tibia, and fibula in the generic model will be replaced with anatomically realistic segment geometries, while preserving a consistent simulation pipeline across model types. The same standardized kick motion will be simulated using both the generic model scaled by height and body mass and the subject specific geometry model. We will compare joint angles, joint moments, selected muscle forces, and knee joint contact forces to evaluate how anatomical personalization alters predicted internal loading. We expect that incorporating realistic bone geometry will produce meaningful differences in predicted knee joint contact forces and muscle force requirements, indicating that bone geometry contributes uniquely to subject specific estimates of knee loading beyond simple scaling. These findings would support the importance of anatomical realism when interpreting modeled knee loading for sport performance and injury related questions, and they will motivate future work focused on validation against experimental measurements and extension to additional high risk movements such as cutting and landing.
