I am a PhD student in the electrical engineering department under the advisory of Sandy Napel. In collaboration with Scott Delp, Silvia Blemker and Garry Gold, I am currently focused on the development of techniques for inferring the in vivo 3D arrangement of skeletal muscle fascicles utilizing diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). The anisotropic composition of muscle, mainly resulting from muscle fascicle composition, dictates force actuation of the muscle. By employing statistical inference techniques, one can infer the most probable orientations of the muscle fibers within an individual DTI dataset. Statistics derived from these inferred muscle fibers can then be used to build more specific physical models of muscles from more representative subject populations. The culmination of this work will provide SimTK with a suite of software tools for converting input DTI data of individual subjects into detailed models and statistics for muscle simulation.

E-mail: sherbond@stanford.edu