A Musculoskeletal Model for Estimating Hip Contact Pressure During Walking

Cartilage contact pressures are major factors in osteoarthritis etiology and are commonly estimated using finite element analysis (FEA). FEA models often include subject-specific joint geometry, but lack subject-specific joint kinematics and muscle forces. Musculoskeletal models use subject-specific kinematics and muscle forces but often lack methods for estimating cartilage contact pressures. Our objective was to adapt an elastic foundation (EF) contact model within OpenSim software to predict hip cartilage contact pressures and compare results to validated FEA models. EF and FEA models were built for five subjects. In the EF models, kinematics and muscle forces were applied and pressure was calculated as a function of cartilage overlap depth. Cartilage material properties were perturbed to find the best match to pressures from FEA. EF models with elastic modulus = 15 MPa and Poisson's ratio = 0.475 yielded results most comparable to FEA, with peak pressure differences of 4.34 ± 1.98 MPa (% difference = 39.96 ± 24.64) and contact area differences of 3.73 ± 2.92% (% difference = 13.4 ± 11.3). Peak pressure location matched between FEA and EF for 3 of 5 subjects, thus we do not recommend this model if the location of peak contact pressure is critically important to the research question. Contact area magnitudes and patterns matched reasonably between FEA and EF, suggesting that this model may be useful for questions related to those variables, especially if researchers desire inclusion of subject-specific geometry, kinematics, muscle forces, and dynamic motion in a computationally efficient framework.