Dimensional Representation of Skeletal Movement and Muscle Activity in a Pygmy Goat
X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM) is a technique and a workflow using MatLab and Maya scripts that combines bi-planar x-ray videos – from two mobile fluoroscopes each with a high speed video camera attached – of an animal performing a simple stereotyped movement such as chewing or walking, with computed tomographic (CT) scans of the animal’s bones, creating an animated three-dimensional skeletal reconstruction of the movement. We applied XROMM techniques to produce an animation of the skull and mandibles of a goat while it chewed hard food. In Autodesk Maya we then modeled adductor muscles on the bone models based on serial sections. We animated the color of these muscles based on their activation patterns, by importing recordings of muscle activity, or electromyographic (EMG) data.
