Most people move their arms and legs, their fingers and their toes, hundreds of times in an hour without even thinking about it.

Tom Buchanan does think about it, because understanding how the brain controls motion is critical to his research in bioengineering. Director of the University's Center for Biomedical Engineering Research (CBER), Buchanan also is associate professor of mechanical engineering and the academic director of the Biomechanics and Movement Science Program.

When you wear that many hats, it can be difficult to know which one to talk about first. But, the recent award of a major grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the biomedical engineering center has Buchanan's attention focused there. The center was established in 1992 as an umbrella organization for research in this area, but only recently has an effort been made to use it as a focal point for attracting major funding for multidisciplinary research. The $6.4 million NIH grant, which includes start-up funds for young faculty, will support a multi-pronged investigation of osteoarthritis, Buchanan says.

"Progress in preventing, treating and adapting to osteoarthritis requires expertise in a variety of areas," he says. "The condition is of interest to mechanical engineers in terms of wear and tear on the joints, to biologists as the immune response comes into play, to clinical physical therapists for their role in treatment and to health and exercise scientists with regard to the role of biomechanics in triggering arthritis."

Although CBER is a research center rather than an academic program, it provides research opportunities for students in related programs, including the graduate-level Biomechanics and Movement Science Program. Affiliated faculty from three UD colleges represent a broad range of disciplines, including sport biomechanics, physical therapy, applied physiology, engineering and computer science.

"The uniqueness of the program is enabling us to attract very high-quality students," Buchanan says. "Ours is one of very few programs like this in the country, and we have the added advantage of outstanding specialized research laboratories, such as those in UD's Ice Skating Science Development Center." Now in its sixth year, the program is seeing its first generation of graduates.

On the subject of his own research, Buchanan says one of his current projects, conducted in collaboration with Prof. Lynn Snyder-Mackler in the Department of Physical Therapy, focuses on injuries to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) of the knee.

"What Lynn was seeing in her practice was that a large number of people with ACL injuries recover without surgical intervention and return to full participation in high-level athletic competition, while others don't," Buchanan says. "Through her NIH grant, we're examining what distinguishes 'copers' from 'non-copers.'"

Mackler and Buchanan are using a specialized imaging technique, called cine-phase contrast magnetic resonance imaging, to image and track the moving knee. The noninvasive technique originally was developed to track blood flow, but the UD researchers have developed a means to "trick the machine" so that it can be used to study the subjects' kinematics (i.e., gait analysis) and muscle activation patterns during a variety of tasks. Their goal is to develop a diagnostic tool that will allow patients to avoid unnecessary surgery.

In another project, Buchanan is using a "virtual arm"--computer-graphics models of the muscles and bones of the arm--to study and model how the brain controls arm movements.

"The brain turns on muscle via an electrical signal that can be measured using an electromyogram, or EMG," Buchanan explains. "We plan to use EMGs to control the model, thus allowing the user to control the arm on the screen just by thinking about moving his or her own arm." In other words, even if the human subject's arm is strapped down and prevented from moving, the brain signal of an intention to move in a certain direction will activate the virtual arm to make that movement.

"This setup will provide us with a novel way to test models of prosthetic limbs and strategies for functional electrical stimulation," Buchanan says. "These models will then be used to explore the strategies used by the brain to control arm movements in normal and neurologically impaired subjects. Once we understand the rules the brain uses for coordinating muscles, we can supplement, augment or replace that function in neurologically impaired subjects, such as victims of stroke or spinal cord injuries. Understanding how it occurs naturally will enable us to mimic it using artificial means."

Other researchers affiliated with the Center for Biomedical Engineering Research are carrying out research on topics ranging from the development of rehabilitation robots for patients with neurological and musculoskeletal impairments to investigations of stress fractures in women runners and airflow problems associated with sleep apnea. All these research projects are part of the center's mission to "provide engineering science and clinical technology to reduce the impact of disease on the everyday life of individuals."

For Buchanan, progress toward that mission has taken a big jump with the award of the NIH grant. "This program will really enable us to get biomedical engineering up and running at Delaware," he says.

The goal of the five-year grant is to create infrastructure and expertise to address the mechanisms of osteoarthritis and its prevention and treatment. It will fund research in four specific areas: the healing of cartilage, a biomechanical analysis of the osteoarthritic knee, the effect of in-shoe wedges on the osteoarthritic knee and the impact of knee alignment on the progression of osteoarthritis.

--Diane Kukich, AS '73, '84M