Whole Body Musculoskeletal Modeling

Sex-Specific Whole Body Musculoskeletal Modeling 

Sex differences in musculoskeletal disease, injury, and aging create disparities in health care. Currently, musculoskeletal models are widely used to study musculoskeletal diseases and injuries. However, these models primarily rely on: 1) data from male-only populations, and/or 2) data that average measures from male and female populations, thus ignoring the sex differences that are known to exist in skeletal anatomy, muscle architecture and strength. These profound limitations leave the field without essential tools to examine how sex differences in musculoskeletal structure influence movement biomechanics, injury, and disease.

This project will resolve these serious limitations through three key aims. Aim 1 will use advanced imaging approaches to create a first-of-its-kind digital database of musculoskeletal structure that characterizes the lower limbs of 50 female and 50 male subjects across a wide range of body sizes. Aim 2 will incorporate this digital database into a computational framework that will create and validate a sex-specific scaling approach for lower limb OpenSim models. Aim 3 will utilize the models to examine how sex differences in musculoskeletal structure influence muscle function and knee joint contact loads during two motor tasks: gait and landing biomechanics. Taken together, these aims will address critical questions related to how sex differences impact movement biomechanics, injury susceptibility, injury recovery, and neuromuscular disease. The work will also provide a rigorous, detailed, digital database of data and models that will be easy to use and openly accessible to the community.