This project is an attempt to apply formal biomechanical research systems methods to the direct manual manipulation clinical methods used by Osteopathic physicians and physical therapists. We have been looking at designing interactive visualization models using IDL, 3D_SLICER, PARAVIEW and OSIRIX.

However, we are now looking into the efficacy of applying OpenSim to this effort.

The central problem: OMM is taught in detail to all first year DO students and requires the development of a profound store of anatomical knowledge involving complete academic didactic traing, dissection and physiology along with the other basic medical sciences.

The mainline textbooks of osteopathic medicine describe distinct diagnostic and treatment protocols for all regions of the body using clinical manipulation for abnormalities seen to be treatable by these methods. In doing so, the introductory information describes Fuller\'s et. al. biomechanical systems known as synergy and tensegrity to describing the general characteristics of the integrate human myofascial framework, but do not appear to apply it in training situations.

Our research team feels that developing 3D dynamic biomechanical anatomical visualizations that will react to external perturbation by instructor and student and have the cause-effect results demonstrated on top of the anatomical structures via vector diagrams would be a revolutionary educational breakthrough. We intend to proceed from simple didactic demonstration visualizations for a series of case studies towards a virtual simulation linking clinicial/student hand local pressure and movement to the internal anatomy of a given patient by first using the Visible Human dataset (male and female) as the standard model, having CT/MR sets of the local region generated for a given patient, registering the image sets and using the network of landmark points transferred to the patient\'s model from the gold standard VHM/F model to generate the superimposed tensegrity model.

Our task will be to either apply existing functions of OpenSim capable of achieving this, borrow functions from another SimTk project or develope our own under the SimTk framework.

Upon generating working and tested software, we will be testing it on experimental and control groups of students and instructors here at Des Moines University.

All results will be published and all resource sources from SimTk will be acknowledged as well as posting the software designs on the SimTk site.