Hoof Blog Fun: Animated Anatomy Models of the Imagination

It's Sunday, so let's have some Hoof Blog fun.

As you can imagine, the walls here at Hoofcare Publishing are plastered with new and old anatomy posters and gait diagrams.

This one needs a stud girth and over-reach boots.

One day I started wondering about the horses who model for anatomy diagrams. Were they chosen for their ideal conformation--or did they even exist at all? Are there such ideal horses out there?

I like to think that when I turn out the lights in the office at night, the fun begins. Books open and close on their own. Trophy hammers hit on trophy shoes (but never leave a mark). Rasps rise up and sing a duet.

But until I saw this video, I hadn't considered what might happen with the anatomy posters and the gait charts. Maybe they have fun too and those horses that stand still so perfectly all day on the wall suddenly rear up and take off.

Michael Mansfield, who animated the anatomy models in this video, obviously has a great sense of humor, as well as a lot of patience to have animated all these still images.

What's wrong with this picture?

Obvious too is that Mike Mansfield's anatomy model horses never attended a Hilary Clayton lecture on equine locomotion.

I like to think that when I turn out the lights tonight, all those perfect standing models will give the gallop a try.

Thanks to Mike Mansfield, for inspiring me to think that anatomy diagrams might have a secret life!

Let's just hope they gallop more like this horse, used in an equine locomotion research project at the Royal Veterinary College in England:

Hoof and lower limb anatomy like you've never seen--and you control it! Click to orde

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.  

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any direct compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned, other than Hoofcare Publishing. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

Equine Gait Analysis Has a Secondary Benefit: Upgrading Video Game Quality

by Fran Jurga | 30 November 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

Sometimes I see people shake their heads after a lecture on the wonders of video-based gait analysis of horses. They just don't get it. And admittedly, the lectures can be boring, although Mark Aikens certainly showed how interesting and practical it can be when he spoke at Cornell University's farrier conference two weeks ago. (More information is coming on that presentation!)

But did you know that roughly the same process used to identify gait abnormalities in a clinical setting is used to collect data points of horses for animation? Today's video takes you to a makeshift video studio on a riding arena in England, where a video crew is "filming" a white horse that will later star in a video game.



Here's a rough cut of what the animators were able to re-create from the data points. So the next time you waste an hour playing Oblivion, just ask yourself where that horse got his moves. His moves might just be data points, plucked out of a riding arena by a geeky animation crew that could moonlight at an equine hospital, if they were so inclined.



© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Google Ocean and the Animated MRI of a Horse's Foot

by Fran Jurga | 4 August 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

This blog post is comprised of three "aha!" moments.

It began back in February when I was intrigued by the launch of Google Oceans, an enhancement of Google Earth that allows us to look at the ocean floor, go inside the hull of a sunken ship, or explore the base of an iceberg in Antarctica. I imagine one day soon that the lobstermen around here won't have to go out and check their traps anymore; they will simply get on Google Ocean, type in the GPS coordinates of each trap, and see what they've caught. Then they would have to haul only those traps.

The image (above) that Google Ocean served up to promote its new program made me think of the horse's hoof, of course. The hoof has a lot in common with an iceberg. Everything is going on where we can't see it. Things are larger than they appear on the surface. And there's more to it than meets the eye. And as the history of the Titanic will tell you, a problem with an iceberg can ruin your day, or even end it. The same goes for a hoof.

Fast forward a couple of months and I'm lying inside an MRI unit in Massachusetts General Hospital. I'm determined to understand and appreciate this uncomfortable and deafening experience and use whatever I can get out of it to enhance my comprehension of magnetic imaging of the horse's foot.

Except no one on the staff wants to talk to me and the noise is too loud for conversation anyway.
I appreciate MRI images of the horse's foot because it is a new way to see inside the foot but I'm never sure what I'm looking at because I am trying to keep in mind that that is just a slice, unlike a radiograph. The MRI is like a strip of film negatives of a sequence of images in an old-fashioned filmstrip (albeit in 3D). When the radiologist looks at the MRI, he or she views the series mounted together on a sheet, not a single isolated image. Together, they make up the whole, but the isolated view reveals the injury.

MRI should be a collective noun, not a singular. That's what I brought out of that clanging tube that day at the hospital.

Fast forward again. Now it's the end of July and I'm in Columbus, Ohio, sitting in the back row at the AAEP's Focus on the Foot summer meeting. I'm really enjoying the speakers, taking notes like mad, and regretting missing the first day.

A change in the schedule brings North Carolina State University's Dr Rich Redding to the stage; he had been the victim of media glitches the day before, so his lecture was rescheduled. What a bonus for me! His lecture offers a hybrid approach to examining the foot and selecting the imaging modality for an injury diagnosis. All his images of the foot are lovely and explained very clearly but it all comes together for me when he compares four cases of foot injuries--puncture wound, two collateral ligament strains, and navicular zone pain by showing their MRIs.

The first thing that caught my attention was the should-be standard technique of showing a dissected foot cut at a specific point, and positioning an MRI "slice" at the same point next to it. That helped visualize the level in the foot where the injury was, and all the structures seen in the MRI, since the navicular bone can be viewed on so many different slices through the coffin joint.

Then, instead of showing an isolated MRI slice that showed the lesion site, he animated the slices into a fly-through of the entire MRI series.

Dr. Redding writes: "This was a horse that had a puncture to the navicular bone that damaged the Deep Digital Flexor (DDF) Tendon with a flap of tendinous tissue on the dorsal tendon proximal to the navicular bone. There is hemosiderin in the digital cushion where the nail penetrated the frog into the DDF and navicular bone." (Rough translation: the nail was in the back part of the foot so it grazed the upper surface of the navicular bone, which is at the level of the short pastern bone in the coffin joint. Watch the video and when the black square of P2 appears, you will see the injured area very briefly.)

It was Google Ocean all over again. You're beneath the surface, flying through; stop where you like and have a look around.

When they decide to do Google Hoof, I'm ready. Or maybe we're already doing it.

Thanks to Dr. Redding for the loan of this animation.


© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Australian Anatomy Animation: Tendons and Ligaments of the Distal Limb

by Fran Jurga | 9 June 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

People make a lot of jokes about "boning" up on their equine anatomy knowledge, but Australian researcher Jonathan Merritt took it to heart and dedicated himself to creating a three-dimensional model of the lower limb of the horse, on which he has applied the ligaments that hold the entire apparatus together and the tendons that move its parts. He applied them layer by layer so that you can see the enormous complexity of the segmented structure of the equine limb.

The technical definition of a ligament is an attachment between two bones; generally a ligament is in a position that will make use of its fibruous strength in just the right place and angle to stabilize a joint. Ligaments allow flexion, but prevent malfunction. Tendons, of course, are extensions of the muscles in the upper limb that move the joints in the lower limb.

Jonathan Merritt's PhD thesis at the University of Melbourne was on the biomechanics of the forelimb of the horse. The focus of the research has been the relationship between the dynamics of locomotion and the strains induced in the third metacarpal bone. Dr. Merritt's work includes being lead researcher in the study Influence of Muscle-Tendon Wrapping on Calculations of Joint Reaction Forces in the Equine Distal Forelimb in the Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology (Click here to read online.)

Here's his description of how the little video was made: "The models of the bones were created from real equine limb bones using in-house photogrammetric software that I wrote. The bones were imported into Blender, and the ligaments and tendons were modeled by hand. Finally, a custom RenderMan exporter script was used to export the models and camera animations to the Aqsis renderer."

Dr. Merritt has been very generous to post this video and others he's made both on YouTube and vimeo.com.

I don't know that you can or should download it and hope that no one will abuse his generosity in both posting the videos and allowing them to be seen in places like this blog. The right thing to do would be to bookmark the video, send others to watch it and send an email to him letting him know you appreciated his hard work.

Encouraging talented people like Dr Merritt to pursue further studies in equine biomechanics and anatomy would benefit us all. Thanking generous people like him can't be done often enough.

Click here to go to Jonathan Merritt's home page on YouTube.com; you can send him an email from there and also see some of his other videos.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Best of 2008: A Class Act at the McPhail Center's Equinology Gait Seminar

by Fran Jurga | 29 December 2008 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

I had a wild plan and approached Dr. Hilary Clayton of Michigan State University's McPhail Center for Equine Performance with my proposal: a camp for professional at her research center, where we could learn about high-tech gait analysis and help her with a research project.

With her usual British chipper nonchalance, she replied. "Ok, come in October then. It's already in the works." The Equinology group had a course planned at the McPhail Center and it was to be open to equine professionals in search of a deeper exposure to the high-tech side of equine biomechanics.

As it turned out, I wasn't able to be there, but Sarah Miles provided a wonderful report, from which these comments are taken:

The McPhail Center, located at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University in East Lansing, is one of the few university labs designed expressly for studying equine biomechanics. It is a fantastic facility — our classroom looked into the covered riding arena where research staff and students collect data with the horses.

When Dr. Clayton dramatically lifted the curtains on the riding arena the first day, a collective gasp of awe went up from the group. She told us that the building's vaulted ceiling design actually is borrowed from church architecture, so we really were having a religious experience, of sorts! But perhaps that explains the sense of “entering the inner sanctum” that one gets from learning from this world-renowned equine biomechanics expert and her staff and students in the lab designed just for their research.

Of course, what is really interesting about the arena is primarily along one side, where eight infrared video cameras collect data from horses lit like Christmas trees (Dr. Clayton’s words), as their anatomical markers move through the cameras’ shimmering red field of vision. It is one thing to hear Dr. Clayton describe the process of research and data collection, and another to experience it for yourself.

Horses' joints are marked with photosensitive styrofoam balls that will light up under infrared camera exposure. (McPhail Center photo courtesy of Dr Hilary Clayton)

The end result of the gait analysis is a stick-horse animation showing the horse in motion on the computer screen. A further sophistication of this system creates a 3D rendering. (McPhail Center photo courtesy of Dr Hilary Clayton)

Dr. Narelle Stubbs, the equine physiotherapist who co-wrote Activate Your Horse’s Core with Dr. Clayton and lab manager LeeAnn Kaiser helped us to tape all the markers on the horse in the right spots. LeeAnn showed us how they calibrate the cameras, create a template, collect the data, connect the dots, and generate three-dimensional computer animation of the horse in motion. The data is also logged into spreadsheets and analyzed for the results of any given project. Dr. Clayton explained that this technology is very similar to how they created “Golem” in Lord of the Rings.

A lecture by Dr. Clayton on the function of the stifle offered her untested hypothesis (stemming from the fact that the torque on the stifle joint is in the back of the joint) that the horse’s hamstring muscles are more important in the action of the stifle than the quads. Her thinking on this was that dressage horses are asked to work as though they are “sitting.” A student with experience in ballet volunteered the ballerina's plie support system of standing on the toes while engaging the hamstrings and adductors so that the quads are more relaxed and not the sole source of support. He even demonstrated the plie for the class!

In this research project, a rider's rein tension in measured. Rein tension can be compared between riders or to understand how different bits or the components of a bridle and reins are working. (McPhail Center photo courtesy of Dr Hilary Clayton)

Other highlights of the course included how the force plates work, and a riding demonstration of an electronic pad placed beneath the saddle to measure the pressure it puts on the horse’s back as he performs different activities, and an afternoon spent practicing core mobilization and strengthening exercises for horses with Dr. Stubbs.

The winter edition of this Equinology course is held at Writtle College in England in January and is sold out. Equinology’s next USA course, Biomechanics and Gait Analysis (EQ300MSU), with Dr. Clayton at The McPhail Center will be held October 12-15, 2009. An understanding of basic anatomic and veterinary vocabulary is a prerequisite for this class. Visit www.equinology.com for more information.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.