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Session: Motor Control II
Session starts: Friday 25 January, 13:00
Presentation starts: 13:00
Room: Lecture room 558

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Sjoerd Kolk (Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen)
Olga Schenk (University of Twente, Enschede)
Eric Visser (Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen)
Vivian Weerdesteyn (Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen)
Nico Verdonschot (Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen, University of Twente, Enschede)

Abstract:
Background The goal of the TLEMsafe project is to predict functional outcome of extensive orthopedic interventions on the lower limb. Functional outcome is predicted using subject-specific musculo-skeletal (M-S) models. The most important model outcome is muscular activity during walking, which thus needs to be extensively validated, initially using healthy subjects. The purpose of this study was to determine the contribution of each muscle of the lower limb to walking. In contrast to other available methods (e.g. electromyography), positron emission tomography (PET) in combination with [F-18]fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) allows detailed study of muscular activity in walking regardless of whether a muscle is situated superficially or inferiorly [1]. The FDG is taken up by muscles that are active during walking. Methods Ten healthy subjects walked on a treadmill at their own comfortable walking speed for a total of 90 minutes, 60 minutes before and 30 minutes after intravenous injection of 50 MBq FDG. A PET scan of the lower limb was made subsequently. Regions-of-interest (ROI) were drawn on 54 muscles using detailed anatomical MRI scans that were already available. The ROI were then superimposed on the PET scan, yielding muscle FDG uptake. Results The muscles with the highest uptake were the soleus, gastrocnemius medialis, tibialis anterior, the gluteal muscles, and the vastus lateralis and intermedius. There were no significant differences within subjects between dominant and non-dominant side (p=0.59), nor between subjects based on age (p=0.44) or gender (p=0.09). Conclusions Our data indicate that FDG-PET has a high discriminative ability and is useful for the investigation of muscular activity during walking. These data are extremely valuable in the validation of M-S models. A limitation is that we only analyzed single slices, which might not represent whole muscle activity. This will be subject to future study. Acknowledgement: The TLEMsafe Project (http://www.tlemsafe.eu/) is financially supported under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission. REFERENCES [1] N. Oi, et al., “FDG-PET imaging of lower extremity muscular activity during level walking”. J Orthop Sci, Vol. 8, pp. 55-61, (2003).