Predicting gait adaptations due to ankle plantarflexor muscle weakness and contracture using physics-based musculoskeletal simulations.

ABSTRACT: Deficits in the ankle plantarflexor muscles, such as weakness and contracture, occur commonly in conditions such as cerebral palsy, stroke, muscular dystrophy, Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, and sarcopenia. While these deficits likely contribute to observed gait pathologies, determining cause-effect relationships is difficult due to the often co-occurring biomechanical and neural deficits. To elucidate the effects of weakness and contracture, we systematically introduced isolated deficits into a musculoskeletal model and generated simulations of walking to predict gait adaptations due to these deficits. We trained a planar model containing 9 degrees of freedom and 18 musculotendon actuators to walk using a custom optimization framework through which we imposed simple objectives, such as mini

SUBMITTER: Ong CF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6797212 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature