CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

ARTÍCULO PUBLICADOAnalysis of the human locomotor system using rigid-body musculoskeletal models has increased in the biomechanical community with the objective of studying muscle activations on different movements. Simultaneously, the finite element (FE) method has emerged as a complementary approach for analyzing the mechanical behavior of tissues. Thus, the purposes of this study were to implement an integrative biomechanical framework for gaitanalysis (by linking a musculoskeletal model of the lower limb and a subject-specific FE model of the pelvis), to perform a convergence study, to compare its performance with other similar models and to perform a sensitivity study to analyse how the use of no subject-specific material properties could affect the FE stress-strain distributions throughout the gaitcycle.As results of the present work, we found that the mesh that provided thebest results in the convergence study was one with ∼84.000 nodes and∼376.700 tetrahedral elements later to perform a convergence study of theFE meshes. The closeness (in shape and magnitude) of the total contactforce in the joint as estimated by the integrative approach and the rigidbody musculoskeletal model suggested that the FE model estimatesadequately the total force. Displacements found on the FE model(displacement of the pelvic bones along the sagittal direction) wereapproximately of 0.5 mm and maximum von Mises stress valuesapproximately of 17 MPa were found in the pelvis which it maximum stressareas were moves through the pelvic bone and were smoothed by effect ofthe hip joint movement and the muscle forces that act during walking.Also, the inclusion of muscle forces in the FE model shows a behavior moresimilar to the physiological expected patterns. Future work will focus onincluding other deformable structures, such as the femur and the tibia.

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