A Musculoskeletal Model of the Hand and Wrist Capable of Simulating Functional Tasks

Objective: The purpose of this work was to develop an open-source musculoskeletal model of the hand and wrist and to evaluate its performance during simulations of functional tasks. Methods: The musculoskeletal model was developed by adapting and expanding upon existing musculoskeletal models. An optimal control theory framework that combines forward-dynamics simulations with a simulated-annealing optimization was used to simulate maximum grip and pinch force. Active and passive hand opening were simulated to evaluate coordinated kinematic hand movements. Results: The model's maximum grip force production matched experimental measures of grip force, force distribution amongst the digits, and displayed sensitivity to wrist flexion. Simulated lateral pinch strength fell within variability of in vivo palmar pinch strength data. Additionally, predicted activation for 7 of 8 muscles fell within variability of EMG data during palmar pinch. The active and passive hand opening simulations predicted reasonable activations and demonstrated passive motion mimicking tenodesis, respectively. Conclusion: This work advances simulation capabilities of hand and wrist models and provides a foundation for future work to build upon. Significance: This is the first open-source musculoskeletal model of the hand and wrist to be implemented during both functional kinetic and kinematic tasks. We provide a novel simulation framework to predict maximal grip and pinch force which can be used to evaluate how potential surgical and rehabilitation interventions influence these functional outcomes while requiring minimal experimental data.

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Quantification of Hand Grip Force under Dynamic Conditions

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting ◽

10.1177/154193129303701015 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 37 (10) ◽

pp. 715-719 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Katherine R. Lehman ◽

W. Gary Allread ◽

P. Lawrence Wright ◽

William S. Marras

Keyword(s):

Grip Force ◽

Wrist Flexion ◽

Range Of Movement ◽

Ulnar Deviation ◽

Dynamic Conditions ◽

Radial Deviation ◽

Hand Grip ◽

Flexion Extension ◽

Maximum Grip ◽

Lower Grip

A laboratory experiment was conducted to determine whether grip force capabilities are lower when the wrist is moved than in a static position. The purpose was to determine the wrist velocity levels and wrist postures that had the most significant effect on grip force. Maximum grip forces of five male and five female subjects were determined under both static and dynamic conditions. The dominant wrist of each subject was secured to a CYBEX II dynamometer and grip force was collected during isokinetic wrist deviations for four directions of motion (flexion to extension, extension to flexion, radial to ulnar, and ulnar to radial). Six different velocity levels were analyzed and grip forces were recorded at specific wrist positions throughout each range of movement. For flexion-extension motions, wrist positions from 45 degrees flexion to 45 degrees extension were analyzed whereas positions from 20 degrees radial deviation to 20 degrees ulnar deviation were studied for radial-ulnar activity. Isometric exertions were also performed at each desired wrist position. Results showed that, for all directions of motion, grip forces for all isokinetic conditions were significantly lower than for the isometric exertions. Lower grip forces were exhibited at extreme wrist flexion and extreme radial and ulnar positions for both static and dynamic conditions. The direction of motion was also found to affect grip strength; extension to flexion exertions produced larger grip forces than flexion to extension exertions and radial to ulnar motion showed larger grip forces than ulnar to radial deviation. Although, males produced larger grip forces than females in all exertions, significant interactions between gender and velocity were noted.

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Effects of Force Requirements on Pinch Force Production in Healthy Adults

Motor Control ◽

10.1123/mc.2014-0081 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 20 (3) ◽

pp. 299-315 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Aisha Khan ◽

Stacey L. Gorniak

Keyword(s):

Motor Unit ◽

Visual Feedback ◽

Grip Force ◽

Force Production ◽

Error Rates ◽

Visual Signal ◽

Signal Frequency ◽

Fine Motor ◽

Pinch Force ◽

Motor Unit Firing

Previous studies of fine motor control have focused on the ability of participants to match their grip force production to a visually provided template. We investigated differences exhibited in pinch force control during variable force production templates, including sine-, sawtooth-, and square-wave templates. Our results indicate that increased force requirements are associated with increased error rates and a noisier frequency spectrum, consistent with previous studies. Our results also indicate that visual feedback, in the form of template shape, directly affect pinch force production features and motor unit firing patterns, despite the use of consistent baseline force requirements, amplitude changes, and visual signal frequency. This suggests that CNS modulation of motor unit responses can be triggered by basic changes in visual feedback unrelated to force requirements. The potential implications of error compensation based on this study due to aging are also discussed.

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Complex couplings between joints, muscles and performance: the role of the wrist in grasping

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-019-55443-w ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Mathieu Caumes ◽

Benjamin Goislard de Monsabert ◽

Hugo Hauraix ◽

Eric Berton ◽

Laurent Vigouroux

Keyword(s):

Muscle Activation ◽

Grip Force ◽

Muscle Force ◽

Muscle Length ◽

Musculoskeletal Model ◽

Muscle Properties ◽

Length Relationship ◽

And Performance ◽

The Relationship ◽

Maximum Grip

AbstractThe relationship between posture, muscle length properties and performance remains unclear, because of a lack of quantitative data. Studies on grasping tasks suggested that wrist position could favour the extrinsic finger flexor in regards to their length to maximise grip force performance. The present study aimed at providing quantitative evidence of the links between wrist posture, muscle capacities and grip capabilities. It combines experimental measurements and a musculoskeletal model including the force-length relationship of the four prime muscles used in grasping. Participants exerted their maximum grip force on a cylindrical dynamometer in four different wrist postures, including one freely chosen by participants (spontaneous). A musculoskeletal model computed the muscle force level and length from motion capture and muscle activation. Results revealed that participants exerted maximum grip force spontaneously, with a loss of force when using other postures. At muscle force and length level, grip force variation seems to be associated with all the muscles under study. This observation led to a first quantitative link between power grip, posture and muscle properties, which could provide more insight into neuromechanical interaction involved when grasping. The design of ergonomic devices could also benefit from this quantification of the relationship between wrist angle and muscle length properties.

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Functional implications of supercontracting muscle in the chameleon tongue retractors

Journal of Experimental Biology ◽

10.1242/jeb.204.21.3621 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 204 (21) ◽

pp. 3621-3627 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Anthony Herrel ◽

Jay J. Meyers ◽

Peter Aerts ◽

Kiisa C. Nishikawa

Keyword(s):

Prey Capture ◽

Three Dimensional ◽

Force Production ◽

Retractor Muscle ◽

Muscle Physiology ◽

Large Prey ◽

Wide Range ◽

Ambush Predators ◽

Full Body

SUMMARYChameleons capture prey items using a ballistic tongue projection mechanism that is unique among lizards. During prey capture, the tongue can be projected up to two full body lengths and may extend up to 600 % of its resting length. Being ambush predators, chameleons eat infrequently and take relatively large prey. The extreme tongue elongation (sixfold) and the need to be able to retract fairly heavy prey at any given distance from the mouth are likely to place constraints on the tongue retractor muscles. The data examined here show that in vivo retractor force production is almost constant for a wide range of projection distances. An examination of muscle physiology and of the ultrastructure of the tongue retractor muscle shows that this is the result (i) of active hyoid retraction, (ii) of large muscle filament overlap at maximal tongue extension and (iii) of the supercontractile properties of the tongue retractor muscles. We suggest that the chameleon tongue retractor muscles may have evolved supercontractile properties to enable a substantial force to be produced over a wide range of tongue projection distances. This enables chameleons successfully to retract even large prey from a variety of distances in their complex three-dimensional habitat.

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MITK Diffusion Imaging

Methods of Information in Medicine ◽

10.3414/me11-02-0031 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 51 (05) ◽

pp. 441-448 ◽

Cited By ~ 52

Author(s):

P. F. Neher ◽

I. Reicht ◽

T. van Bruggen ◽

C. Goch ◽

M. Reisert ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Data Processing ◽

Open Source ◽

High Performance ◽

Diffusion Imaging ◽

Software Tool ◽

Brain Anatomy ◽

Sustainable Evaluation ◽

Imaging Research ◽

Interactive Data

SummaryBackground: Diffusion-MRI provides a unique window on brain anatomy and insights into aspects of tissue structure in living humans that could not be studied previously. There is a major effort in this rapidly evolving field of research to develop the algorithmic tools necessary to cope with the complexity of the datasets.Objectives: This work illustrates our strategy that encompasses the development of a modularized and open software tool for data processing, visualization and interactive exploration in diffusion imaging research and aims at reinforcing sustainable evaluation and progress in the field.Methods: In this paper, the usability and capabilities of a new application and toolkit component of the Medical Imaging and Interaction Toolkit (MITK, www.mitk.org), MITKDI, are demonstrated using in-vivo datasets.Results: MITK-DI provides a comprehensive software framework for high-performance data processing, analysis and interactive data exploration, which is designed in a modular, extensible fashion (using CTK) and in adherence to widely accepted coding standards (e.g. ITK, VTK). MITK-DI is available both as an open source software development toolkit and as a ready-to-use in stallable application.Conclusions: The open source release of the modular MITK-DI tools will increase verifiability and comparability within the research community and will also be an important step towards bringing many of the current techniques towards clinical application.

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Wrist Action Affects Precision Grip Force

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.1997.78.1.271 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 78 (1) ◽

pp. 271-280 ◽

Cited By ~ 53

Author(s):

Mary M. Werremeyer ◽

Kelly J. Cole

Keyword(s):

Grip Force ◽

Precision Grip ◽

Load Force ◽

Myoelectric Activity ◽

Resistive Load ◽

Wrist Flexion ◽

Wrist Extension ◽

Hand Muscles ◽

Force Pulse ◽

Grasp Stability

Werremeyer, Mary M. and Kelly J. Cole. Wrist action affects precision grip force. J. Neurophysiol. 78: 271–280, 1997. When moving objects with a precision grip, fingertip forces normal to the object surface (grip force) change in parallel with forces tangential to the object (load force). We investigated whether voluntary wrist actions can affect grip force independent of load force, because the extrinsic finger muscles cross the wrist. Grip force increased with wrist angular speed during wrist motion in the horizontal plane, and was much larger than the increased tangential load at the fingertips or the reaction forces from linear acceleration of the test object. During wrist flexion the index finger muscles in the hand and forearm increased myoelectric activity; during wrist extension this myoelectric activity increased little, or decreased for some subjects. The grip force maxima coincided with wrist acceleration maxima, and grip force remained elevated when subjects held the wrist in extreme flexion or extension. Likewise, during isometric wrist actions the grip force increased even though the fingertip loads remained constant. A grip force “pulse” developed that increased with wrist force rate, followed by a static grip force while the wrist force was sustained. Subjects could not suppress the grip force pulse when provided visual feedback of their grip force. We conclude that the extrinsic hand muscles can be recruited to assist the intended wrist action, yielding higher grip-load ratios than those employed with the wrist at rest. This added drive to hand muscles overcame any loss in muscle force while the extrinsic finger flexors shortened during wrist flexion motion. During wrist extension motion grip force increases apparently occurred from eccentric contraction of the extrinsic finger flexors. The coactivation of hand closing muscles with other wrist muscles also may result in part from a general motor facilitation, because grip force increased during isometric knee extension. However, these increases were related weakly to the knee force. The observed muscle coactivation, from all sources, may contribute to grasp stability. For example, when transporting grasped objects, upper limb accelerations simultaneously produce inertial torques at the wrist that must be resisted, and inertial loads at the fingertips from the object that must be offset by increased grip force. The muscle coactivation described here would cause similarly timed pulses in the wrist force and grip force. However, grip-load coupling from this mechanism would not contribute much to grasp stability when small wrist forces are required, such as for slow movements or when the object's total resistive load is small.

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Microvessel Chaste: An Open Library for Spatial Modelling of Vascularized Tissues

10.1101/105692 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

J.A. Grogan ◽

A.J. Connor ◽

B. Markelc ◽

R.J. Muschel ◽

P.K. Maini ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Open Source ◽

Tumour Growth ◽

Spatial Models ◽

3D Models ◽

Tissue Growth ◽

Coronary Perfusion ◽

Analysis Model ◽

User Friendly

AbstractSpatial models of vascularized tissues are widely used in computational physiology, to study for example, tumour growth, angiogenesis, osteogenesis, coronary perfusion and oxygen delivery. Composition of such models is time-consuming, with many researchers writing custom software for this purpose. Recent advances in imaging have produced detailed three-dimensional (3D) datasets of vascularized tissues at the scale of individual cells. To fully exploit such data there is an increasing need for software that allows user-friendly composition of efficient, 3D models of vascularized tissue growth, and comparison of predictions with in vivo or in vitro experiments and other models. Microvessel Chaste is a new open-source library for building spatial models of vascularized tissue growth. It can be used to simulate vessel growth and adaptation in response to mechanical and chemical stimuli, intra- and extra-vascular transport of nutrient, growth factor and drugs, and cell proliferation in complex 3D geometries. The library provides a comprehensive Python interface to solvers implemented in C++, allowing user-friendly model composition, and integration with experimental data. Such integration is facilitated by interoperability with a growing collection of scientific Python software for image processing, statistical analysis, model annotation and visualization. The library is available under an open-source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licence at https://jmsgrogan.github.io/MicrovesselChaste. This article links to two reproducible example problems, showing how the library can be used to model tumour growth and angiogenesis with realistic vessel networks.

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DCEMRI.jl: A fast, validated, open source toolkit for dynamic contrast enhanced MRI analysis

10.7287/peerj.preprints.670 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

David S Smith ◽

Xia Li ◽

Lori R Arlinghaus ◽

Thomas E Yankeelov ◽

E. Brian Welch

Keyword(s):

Open Source ◽

Tissue Concentration ◽

Quantitative Imaging ◽

Imaging Biomarkers ◽

Problem Size ◽

Data Set ◽

Dynamic Contrast Enhanced ◽

Contrast Enhanced ◽

Run Time

We present a fast, validated, open-source toolkit for processing dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) data. We validate it against the Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers Alliance (QIBA) Standard and Extended Tofts-Kety phantoms and find near perfect recovery in the absence of noise, with an estimated 10-20x speedup in run time compared to existing tools. To explain the observed trends in the fitting errors, we present an argument about the conditioning of the Jacobian in the limit of small and large parameter values. We also demonstrate its use on an in vivo data set to measure performance on a realistic application. For a 192 x 192 breast image, we achieved run times of < 1 s. Finally, we analyze run times scaling with problem size and find that the run time per voxel scales as O(N1.9), where N is the number of time points in the tissue concentration curve. DCEMRI.jl was much faster than any other analysis package tested and produced comparable accuracy, even in the presence of noise.

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A three-dimensional musculoskeletal model of the dog

10.1101/2020.07.16.205856 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Heiko Stark ◽

Martin S. Fischer ◽

Alexander Hunt ◽

Fletcher Young ◽

Roger Quinn ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Experimental Data ◽

Body Size ◽

Degrees Of Freedom ◽

Inverse Dynamics ◽

Musculoskeletal Model ◽

Muscle Synergy ◽

Locomotor System ◽

Wide Range ◽

Joint Load

AbstractDogs are an interesting object of investigation because of the wide range of body size, body mass, and physique. In the last several years, the number of clinical and biomechanical studies on dog locomotion has increased. However, the relationship between body structure and joint load during locomotion, as well as between joint load and degenerative diseases of the locomotor system (e.g. dysplasia), are not sufficiently understood. In vivo measurements/records of joint forces and loads or deep/small muscles are complex, invasive, and sometimes ethically questionable. The use of detailed musculoskeletal models may help in filling that knowledge gap. We describe here the methods we used to create a detailed musculoskeletal model with 84 degrees of freedom and 134 muscles. Our model has three key-features: Three-dimensionality, scalability, and modularity. We tested the validity of the model by identifying forelimb muscle synergies of a beagle at walk. We used inverse dynamics and static optimization to estimate muscle activations based on experimental data. We identified three muscle synergy groups by using hierarchical clustering. Predicted activation patterns exhibited good agreement with experimental data for most of the forelimb muscles. We expect that our model will speed up the analysis of how body size, physique, agility, and disease influence joint neuronal control and loading in dog locomotion.

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Theophylline minimally alters contractile properties of canine diaphragm in vitro

Journal of Applied Physiology ◽

10.1152/jappl.1990.69.4.1390 ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 69 (4) ◽

pp. 1390-1396 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

E. Derom ◽

S. Janssens ◽

V. De Bock ◽

M. Decramer

Keyword(s):

High Frequency ◽

Force Production ◽

Contractile Properties ◽

Diaphragm Muscle ◽

Muscle Bundle ◽

Time To Peak ◽

Diaphragm In Vitro ◽

Tetanic Tension

We examined the effects of theophylline on contractile properties and high-frequency fatigue of canine diaphragm in vitro. Eighteen diaphragm muscle bundles were obtained from 10 anesthetized dogs and equilibrated in oxygenated Krebs solution to 100, 200, or 300 mg/l theophylline. These bundles were compared with 18 matched control bundles from the contralateral hemidiaphragm. No statistically significant differences in twitch tension, tetanic tension, twitch-to-tetanus ratio, time to peak tension, or half-relaxation time were observed. Concentrations of 300 mg/l theophylline, however, significantly (P less than 0.05) increased force production at 10 Hz by 32%. A similar tendency was present at lower concentrations and exhibited a clear dose-response behavior. High-frequency fatigue was similar in control and theophylline-treated bundles. We conclude that supratherapeutic in vitro concentrations of theophylline do not increase maximal tetanic tension and do not protect against muscle fatigue but potentiate relative force production at low stimulation frequencies. This relatively small effect cannot be explained by poor diffusion of the drug in the muscle bundle, because theophylline concentrations in the muscle bath and in the muscle bundle were virtually identical. Moreover, it remains unclear whether this potentially beneficial effect can be achieved at in vivo attainable serum concentrations.

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