Abstract Summary
Diabetic foot is a severe complication and represents the most common cause of non-traumatic amputation. The goal of this study was to simulate diabetic foot behaviour and soft tissues internal stresses by taking into account muscle activation, muscle forces, altered foot kinematics and loads. Gait analysis, musculoskeletal dynamic simulations (Opensim) and foot FEM (Abaqus) were combined to estimate the muscles forces, internal stresses and plantar pressure distribution on healthy and diabetic feet. The comparison of extrinsic and intrinsic muscles forces between controls and diabetics and between experimentally measured and simulated plantar pressure showed that the interdependency of muscle force and tissue response justifies a concurrent multiscale modeling approach.
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