Álvaro Sánchez Ferro and Vittorio Caggiano.
Unify motor and neural intelligence together with artificial intelligence it allows to “faithfully replicate human anatomy and movement”. This explains it to Medical Writing Alvaro Sanchez Ferrocoordinator of the New Technologies Committee of the Spanish Society of Neurology (SEN)following the development of a new artificial intelligence platform of musculoskeletal models. The platform makes it possible to advance rehabilitation and the creation of prosthetics for patients. An advance that, according to Sánchez Ferro, might be applied in humans within “three to seven years.”
This great advance, carried out by Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s company, together with the University of Twente in the Netherlands, has multiple applications and among them “power model problems that patients have and develop solutions adapted to them”. This type of solution, adds Sánchez Ferro, “can range from creating prostheses that solve specific deficits due to amputations or injuries, to orthoses that help to make up for a problem in that part of the body”. neurologist emphasizes that “it can help model problems that the person has, in addition to individualize rehabilitation treatments so that they are more precise and successful“.
For the neurologist, this type of advances will mean a before and following for Medicine, which will be able to see the light “in a relatively quick period, less than three years, as long as the models work well and are used only as medical decision support“.
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Álvaro Sánchez: The diseases “of greatest application will be traumatisms, cerebral infarctions and multiple sclerosis” |
On the contrary, Sánchez Ferro points out that “if they are intended to be more definitive systems on which the medical treatment and decisionsthey can take longer, usually three to seven years.” In the event that they are “wanted to be used in conjunction with virtual reality systems, it can take even longer.”
Which patients can benefit from this innovation?
Once this type of innovation reaches clinical practice, Sánchez Ferro details that the main beneficiaries will be “people with muscle or bone injuries of any kindespecially related to trauma. Also patients with movement impairment due to cerebral infarcts, multiple sclerosis or other neurological diseases”. Despite the fact that for the neurologist this innovation is “quite generalizable to any disease”, he points out that the diseases “of greater application will be traumatisms, cerebral infarctions and multiple sclerosis“.
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Meta’s MyoSuite platform. |
A few words to which he also adds Vittorio Caggianodirector of the MyoSuite Technical Program, who underlines Medical Writing that “at the moment, attempts are being made to replicate the general behavior of healthy humans. However, it has been shown that it might be possible simulate loss of muscle strength in older peopletendon ruptures or the use of assistive devices”. In this sense, Caggiano assures that he has just “opened the door to the possibility of exploring these studies by enabling the basic tools and this is only the first step to validate the models and personalize them.
Musculoskeletal models and artificial intelligence
This platform, called MyoSuite, makes it possible to differentiate between two parts: on the one hand, the development of musculoskeletal models and, on the other hand, the artificial intelligence that drives them. From there, as Caggiano explains, “a simulation of the peripheral nervous system is developed, building musculoskeletal simulations of the human hand and elbow. These simulations allow us to understand the effect that muscle activation has on movements and interactions with the environment. This is a difficult problem because, even for the simplest movement, you need to coordinate all the muscles together continuously.”
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Vittorio Caggiano: “It has been shown that artificial intelligence can learn by trial and error to perform the assigned task, resulting in smooth and coordinated movements” |
Although for Caggiano “there is still very little knowledge regarding how intelligent motor behavior arises and is consolidated, it is possible to simulate how humans perform adaptive movements and learn new skills“. An apprenticeship that “will be essential to extend this knowledge to the study of adaptation of traumas, illnessesmotor enhancement and rehabilitation in humans,” he concludes.
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