Image of Fregly courtesy of Rice University.
Researchers led by Benjamin J. Fregly, PhD, a professor of mechanical engineering and bioengineering at Rice University, Houston, Texas, have developed a treatment design software that implements a personalized medicine approach for addressing impaired neuromusculoskeletal function. Called the Neuromusculoskeletal Modeling (NMSM) Pipeline, the software allows researchers to collaborate with clinicians to construct personalized neuromusculoskeletal computer models of individual patients (ie, digital twins) then use those models to design orthopedic surgery, physical therapy, or neurorehabilitation treatments that maximize each patient’s functional outcome
Fregly and his team’s work built on the functionality and reliability of an existing open-source musculoskeletal modeling software package called OpenSim developed by researchers at Stanford University, California. Their new open-source, MATLAB-based software package features 2 new state-of-the-art toolsets–a model personalization toolset and a treatment optimization toolset.
The model personalization toolset for creating “digital twins” of patients factors each patient’s unique anatomy, physiology, and neural control properties to model their pretreatment movement data and numerical optimization to personalize an OpenSim musculoskeletal computer model, so it represents the patient’s joint structure, muscle-tendon, neural control, and foot ground contact properties. By modeling these differences reliably, this toolset accounts for how a patient’s unique characteristics should affect the design of the patient’s clinical intervention.
The treatment optimization toolset combines a patient’s personalized neuromusculoskeletal computer model with a different type of numerical optimization to predict how a patient’s neural control and anatomy should be altered, or how an external device or implant should be designed or controlled to maximize the patient’s movement function after treatment. This allows for fine-tuning the implementation of existing treatments or for identifying entirely new treatments that have not been identified previously.
The primary benefits of the NMSM Pipeline software are its extensive functionality, predictive capabilities, ease of use, and computational speed.
