Authors:
Josef Kohout
1
;
Gordon J. Clapworthy
2
;
Saulo Martelli
3
and
Marco Viceconti
3
Affiliations:
1
University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic
;
2
University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom
;
3
Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, Italy
Keyword(s):
Muscle Modelling, Muscle Fibres, VTK.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Animation and Simulation
;
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Geometric Computing
;
Geometry and Modeling
;
Modeling and Algorithms
;
Real-Time Visual Simulation
Abstract:
This paper describes a method that represents a muscle by a realistic chaff of muscle fibres that are automatically generated in the volume defined by the surface mesh of the muscle which itself automatically wraps around bones as they move. Our C++ implementation can decompose the volume into muscle fibres, which is done by a slice-by-slice morphing of predefined fibres template into the muscle volume, and visualise the result in only about 1000 ms on commodity hardware. Hence, the method is fast enough to be suitable for interactive educational medical software. Although a biomechanical assessment has yet to be done, we believe that the method could be used also in clinical biomechanical applications to extract information on the current muscle lever arm and fibre path and, thanks to its rapid processing speed, it might be an attractive alternative to current methods.