Our PhDs on the road: Elias Wallnöfer and Willi Koller

PhD students Elias and Willi of the PhaNuSpo Doctoral School participated at the prestigious OpenSim+ Advanced Workshop at Stanford University, California, USA.

Report

We, Elias Wallnöfer and Willi Koller, both PhD students of the PhaNuSpo Doctoral School, participated in a workshop at Stanford University in California, USA, at the beginning of March. This workshop for advanced users of the musculoskeletal modelling software OpenSim provided an opportunity to collaborate with the software developers and explore new applications in research. Approximately 50 participants coming from around the globe engaged with their own data and research projects in this hands-on workshop and received support from the Stanford staff to navigate and overcome technical challenges.

We collaborated on a project aimed at determining individualised cost functions, which represent each participant's motor control strategy during walking. The goal was to synchronise predicted kinematics with experimentally measured kinematics. The resulting individualised cost functions will play a crucial role in predicting the outcomes of surgical interventions targeting bony abnormalities, such as femoral de-rotation osteotomy. Such a modelling workflow has the potential to identify the most promising surgical intervention tailored to each specific patient, thereby advancing clinical care for individuals with bony deformities.

During the workshop a broad set of skills for working with the latest enhancements in OpenSim in general and the OpenSim Moco applications in particular were developed and brought back home to Vienna. The basic workflow for the project was developed during the three-day workshop and will now be applied to the ample longitudinal data available in our department to validate this simulation approach.

We thank the PhaNuSpo Doctoral School for the travel grant, which allowed us to attend this workshop and enhance our research.

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