Patient-specific musculoskeletal models to predict surgical outcome

Instrumented clinical gait analysis is used routinely to inform decision-making in neuro-orthopaedics. In addition to gait analysis, musculoskeletal modeling may become a powerful and non-invasive tool to guide clinical management and predict treatment outcomes. However, musculoskeletal modeling needs to integrate patient-specific adaptations, and its outputs need to be validated on a larger scale before it may be used in standard clinical practice.

The goal of this project is to develop patient-specific gait simulations by means of an open-source musculoskeletal modeling software. Results will be validated against existing clinical data pre vs post a typical intervention in neuro-orthopaedics.

Personalized musculoskeletal models from 30 children who received botulinum toxin injection will be developed from gait analysis data obtained before the intervention. To predict patient's response, the botulinum toxin effect will be simulated by weakening the model muscle and running a forward dynamic simulation. I will compare the outcome against existent data post-injection and analyze how induced muscle weakness alters the gait of children with cerebral palsy, providing validation for this specific musculoskeletal modeling application and overall confidence in our framework reliability.