Validation of a musculo-skeletal model of the mandible and its application to mandibular distraction osteogenesis

Mandibular distraction osteogenesis will lead to a change in muscle coordination and load transfer to the temporomandibular joints (TMJ). The objective of this work is to present and validate a rigid-body musculo-skeletal model of the mandible based on inverse dynamics for calculation of the muscle activations, muscle forces and TMJ reaction forces for different types of clenching tasks and dynamic tasks. This approach is validated on a symmetric mandible model and an application will be presented where the TMJ reaction forces during unilateral clenching are estimated for a virtual distraction patient with a shortened left ramus. The mandible model consists of 2 rigid segments and has 4 degrees-of-freedom. The model was equipped with 24 hill-type musculotendon actuators. During the validation experiment one subject was asked to do several tasks while measuring EMG activity, bite force and kinematics. The bite force and kinematics were used as input for the simulations of the same tasks after which the estimated muscle activities were compared with the measured muscle activities. This resulted in an average correlation coefficient of 0.580 and an average of the Mean Absolute Error of 0.109. The virtual distraction model showed a large difference in the TMJ reaction forces between left and right compared with the symmetric model for the same loading case. The present work is a step in the direction of building patient-specific mandible models, which can assess the mechanical effects on the TMJ before mandibular distraction osteogenesis surgery.