The processing design software personalizes medicine plans for people with movement disorders

The function of altered neuromusculoskeletal due to conditions such as strokes, osteoarthritis, cerebral paralysis, Parkinson’s disease, the amputation of the limbs, the spinal cord lesions, traumatic brain lesions and cancer are a worried cause and affect about 1.7 billion people in the world, including 19% of the American adult population.

Researchers led by Benjamin J. of the University of Rice have developed treatment design software that implements a new personalized medicine approach to solve this important societal problem.

Called the neuromusculoskeletal modeling pipeline (NMSM), the software allows researchers to work in collaboration with clinicians to build personalized neuromusculoskeletal computer models of individual patients (i.e. digital twins) and then use these models to design orthopedic surgery, physical therapy or neurorehabilitation treatments Patient functional ratio.

This work has recently been published in the Neuro-engineering and rehabilitation journal.

Movement deficiencies not only produce physical challenges, but also a decrease in quality of life due to the increase in health care costs, the decrease in labor productivity, reduction in independence and increased risk of chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.

Studies show that patients are often dissatisfied with orthopedic surgeries, therapeutic patterns or neurorehabilitation interventions designed using existing approaches when they do not reach their desired level of functional improvement, in particular to carry out simple daily activities.

“An important reason for the sub-optimal functional recovery is that existing processing methods do not adequately meet the single clinical situation and the specific needs of each patient,” said Fregly, professor of mechanical engineering and bio-engineering fiduciary and an institute of prevention and research of Texas School at the George R. Brown School of Engineer and Computing at Rice.

“Our objective was to create a calculation tool based on cutting-edge physiology and physiology which would model the unique anatomy and physiology of each patient with sufficient precision to predict the post-treatment function of the patient with great reliability.

“The tool could then allow clinicians to plan, develop and test a wide range of potential treatments, ultimately identifying that which was most likely to produce the best functional result for the patient.”

Combine physics, physiology and neuroscience to create a personalized modeling solution

The human neuromusculoskeletal system resembles a well -designed mechanical system, suggesting that it can be modeled using physics laws coupled with principles of physiology and neuroscience, and that the calculation technologies that have revolutionized the design of surgical treatment and rehabilitation for the last 25 years.

Frregly and his Rice team have exploited this approach to optimize the proven engineering design to rely on the functionality and reliability of an existing open source musculoskeletal modeling software called OpenSim developed by researchers from the University of Stanford.

Their new open source software package, based on Matlab, called NMSM Pipeline, has two new cutting -edge tools sets – a set of model customization tools to create patients’ digital twins and a set of treatment optimization tools to perform virtual treatments on the patient’s digital twin.

Software is the first of its kind to allow clinic researcher teams to personalize a wide range of anatomical, physiological and neurological properties with patient movement data, then to use the personalized model to design real clinical interventions. Unlike “Black Box” automatic learning models, physics-based models require much less data to develop and can extrapolate with precision to predict new situations (such as post-processing) which are outside the training limits.

The set of models of customization of the model faces unique properties of anatomy, physiology and neural control of each patient to model their pre-treatment movement data and its digital optimization to personalize a model of musculoskeletal OpenSim computer, it therefore represents the patient’s articular structure, muscle outfits, neural control and contact properties at the foot of the foot.

By modeling these differences reliably, this set of tools explains how the unique characteristics of a patient should affect the design of the patient’s clinical intervention.

The processing tools for optimizing processing combines the patient’s personalized neuromusculoskeletal computer model with a different digital optimization type to predict how the neural control and the anatomy of a patient must be modified, or how an external device or implant must be designed or controlled to maximize the patient movement function after treatment. This promising set of tools makes it possible to settle the implementation of existing treatments or to identify entirely new treatments which have not been identified previously.

An example is a personalized rehabilitation treatment for medial knee osteoarthritis designed by Fregly’s Lab in 2007 and recently repredited using the NMSM pipeline. This change in the march has corrected the patient’s knees as much as an invasive orthopedic surgery. In particular, this new rehabilitation treatment had been “hidden in sight” – it took a predictive walking simulation carried out using a personalized computer model to highlight it.

The main advantages of NMSM Pipeline software are its extensive features, predictive capacities, ease of use and calculation speed. With movement data processed collected from a patient before processing, a clinical researcher team can create a personalized neuromusculoskeletal computer model of the patient as little as a day, which makes the concept of a “digital twin” a reality.

Although the process of designing subsequent treatment is currently taking more time, the development of best practices to simulate different types of clinical problems (for example, the neurorehabilitation of strokes compared to pelvic cancer surgery) could allow the entire process of designation of calculation to be carried out in a few days.

Better still, this personalized two -step calculation processing design process can be carried out without writing a single line of computer code, which makes it accessible to people with minimum engineering training.

“We are delighted with the potential of the NMSM pipeline to transform the processing landscape for movement deficiencies,” said Frregly.

“We hope that by making the capacities of modeling, simulation and high -end high -end optimization easy to use, in rapid calculation and available for free, medical and research communities will begin to explore how objective predictions of the post -processing function of a patient based on personalized models can increase – and hope, to improve – subjective predictions of a patient based on experience Clinic. “