Deep Learning for Musculoskeletal Force Prediction.

Journal: Annals of biomedical engineering
Published Date:

Abstract

Musculoskeletal models permit the determination of internal forces acting during dynamic movement, which is clinically useful, but traditional methods may suffer from slowness and a need for extensive input data. Recently, there has been interest in the use of supervised learning to build approximate models for computationally demanding processes, with benefits in speed and flexibility. Here, we use a deep neural network to learn the mapping from movement space to muscle space. Trained on a set of kinematic, kinetic and electromyographic measurements from 156 subjects during gait, the network's predictions of internal force magnitudes show good concordance with those derived by musculoskeletal modelling. In a separate set of experiments, training on data from the most widely known benchmarks of modelling performance, the international Grand Challenge competitions, generates predictions that better those of the winning submissions in four of the six competitions. Computational speedup facilitates incorporation into a lab-based system permitting real-time estimation of forces, and interrogation of the trained neural networks provides novel insights into population-level relationships between kinematic and kinetic factors.

Authors

  • Lance Rane
    Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, Bessemer Building, South Kensington Campus, London, SW7 2AZ, UK. lance.rane14@imperial.ac.uk.
  • Ziyun Ding
    Department of Biological Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA.
  • Alison H McGregor
    Musculoskeletal (MSK) Laboratory, Division of Surgery, Department of Surgery and Cancer, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, Charing Cross Hospital, London W6 8RF, UK.
  • Anthony M J Bull
    Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, Bessemer Building, South Kensington Campus, London, SW7 2AZ, UK.