Unlike most classical engineering materials, biological tissues can adapt to external stimuli by growing in volume: Skin grows in response to wounding; muscles grow in response to exercise; cancer...
Apr, 01, 2011
Moving from intuition to evidence-based intervention
To understand how muscles contract and joints flex, researchers have dissected cadavers and experimented with animals. They can describe how bones, muscles, and tendons connect in a complicated...
Jan, 01, 2007
Even when we simply stand still on two feet, our brains communicate with our muscles—firing them appropriately to keep us upright against gravity. So when scientists simulate simple or complex...
Jun, 06, 2012
In a win-win for patients and researchers, big biomechanics data has arrived.
One rainy day in the late 1990s, a biomechanics doctoral student stood sopping at the street corner, hoping his research participant would arrive for her gait analysis. “It was the third time...
Mar, 01, 2014
In the past, many biomechanical models of gait have omitted the arms. But as such models strive for greater realism, it has become more important to account for secondary movement by the arms.
Most people swing their arms when they walk. Indeed, like several characters in a classic Seinfeld episode, we’re surprised when they don’t. Yet we don’t really need to swing our...
Jul, 01, 2008
August 2007 saw a surge of new open-source software for simulating musculoskeletal movement. In addition to OpenSim 1.0 (described in the Fall 2007 issue of this magazine), FEBio arrived on the scene...
Apr, 01, 2008
Navigating the oviduct and other mysteries
The essential elements of human fertilization are clear: sperm swim through the uterus, travel up the fallopian tube, and fertilize an egg. Not as well understood are the the nitty-gritty details of...
Jun, 19, 2013
How Simbios' state-of-the-art software tools are contributing to high-impact biomedical research
Simbios began with a simple idea: that physics-based simulation of biological structures at all scales could benefit from a
unified tool-building effort.
At the same time, the thinking went,...
Oct, 01, 2009
Every year, doctors in the United States perform more than a million angioplasties: By inflating a tiny balloon inside a clogged artery, cardiologists can compress fatty plaques and restore blood...
Dec, 31, 2008
An explanation of geometric constraints in computational biomechanics
Suppose 20 friends live in the same city and want to meet for dinner. They should be able to identify a unique spot that minimizes the squared distance everyone needs to travel by taking the...
Jan, 02, 2012
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