SCI Publications
2026
Z.J. Eatough, R.J. Lisonbee, A.C. Peterson, S.Y. Elhabian, M. K. Mills, N. Krähenbühl, A. L. Lenz.
Morphologic assessment of peritalar compensation in patients with advanced varus ankle osteoarthritis, In Skeletal Radiology, Springer Nature, 2026.
Objective Varus ankle malalignment is observed in most ankle osteoarthritis patients with approximately half of these patients presenting with peritalar compensation, where the subtalar joint is aligned valgus to compensate for a varus tibiotalar joint. This study developed a 3D weight-bearing computed tomography–based multi-bone statistical shape model to quantify morphologic and alignment differences between compensated and non-compensated presentations of advanced varus ankle osteoarthritis. Materials and methods Our assessment included 70 individuals, 44 diagnosed with advanced varus ankle osteoarthritis, and 26 asymptomatic controls. Each participant underwent weight-bearing computed tomography. Semi-automatic segmentations produced patient-specific 3D bone reconstructions of the distal tibia, distal fibula, talus, calcaneus, navicular, and cuboid. A multi-bone statistical shape model was created using each of the 3D bone reconstructions. Joint space distance, coverage area, and congruence index were measured at equivalent anatomic locations within articular coverage obtained from the statistical shape model. Results Eleven principal component analysis modes retained 85.8% variance. Significant differences existed in mode 1 (medial malleolus and talar dome morphology, fibular positioning; 26.6% variance, p
M. Elhadidy, R.M. D'Souza, A. Arzani.
SLE-FNO: Single-Layer Extensions for Task-Agnostic Continual Learning in Fourier Neural Operators, Subtitled arXiv:2603.20410, 2026.
Scientific machine learning is increasingly used to build surrogate models, yet most models are trained under a restrictive assumption in which future data follow the same distribution as the training set. In practice, new experimental conditions or simulation regimes may differ significantly, requiring extrapolation and model updates without re-access to prior data. This creates a need for continual learning (CL) frameworks that can adapt to distribution shifts while preventing catastrophic forgetting. Such challenges are pronounced in fluid dynamics, where changes in geometry, boundary conditions, or flow regimes induce non-trivial changes to the solution. Here, we introduce a new architecture-based approach (SLE-FNO) combining a Single-Layer Extension (SLE) with the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) to support efficient CL. SLE-FNO was compared with a range of established CL methods, including Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), Learning without Forgetting (LwF), replay-based approaches, Orthogonal Gradient Descent (OGD), Gradient Episodic Memory (GEM), PiggyBack, and Low-Rank Approximation (LoRA), within an image-to-image regression setting. The models were trained to map transient concentration fields to time-averaged wall shear stress (TAWSS) in pulsatile aneurysmal blood flow. Tasks were derived from 230 computational fluid dynamics simulations grouped into four sequential and out-of-distribution configurations. Results show that replay-based methods and architecture-based approaches (PiggyBack, LoRA, and SLE-FNO) achieve the best retention, with SLE-FNO providing the strongest overall balance between plasticity and stability, achieving accuracy with zero forgetting and minimal additional parameters. Our findings highlight key differences between CL algorithms and introduce SLE-FNO as a promising strategy for adapting baseline models when extrapolation is required.
M. Elhadidy, S. Viknesh, R.M. D'Souza, A. Arzani.
Wall Shear Stress Reconstruction from Concentration: Differentiable Physics and Physics-Informed Neural Networks, Subtitled arXiv:2606.06313v1, 2026.
Wall shear stress (WSS) governs near-wall transport dynamics and is a key hemodynamic indicator in cardiovascular flows, yet remains difficult to infer accurately due to the need for precise computation of near-wall velocity gradients. Passive scalar fields, such as concentration or temperature, are advected by the same underlying velocity field and have the potential to uncover hidden flow physics metrics such as WSS. In this work, we demonstrate such reconstruction from spatially limited passive scalar observations using two fundamentally different inverse frameworks: a differentiable physics framework based on discrete adjoint, PDE-constrained optimization, which enforces the governing equations as hard constraints, and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), which treat them as soft constraints. Benchmark problems include a 2D canonical backward-facing step (2D-BFS) and a 3D patient-specific stenotic coronary artery. For the 2D-BFS case, evaluated under three measurement scenarios (near-wall, far-field, and combined), PINN achieves high accuracy when near-wall data are available but fails when restricted to far-field measurements, whereas the differentiable physics approach recovers accurate WSS across all scenarios. In the 3D patient-specific case, the differentiable physics framework outperforms PINNs, yielding accurate WSS reconstruction. These results establish that measurement location and inverse formulation jointly determine reconstruction fidelity in scalar-based near-wall flow inference. The proposed framework opens a path toward estimation of near-wall hemodynamics from scalar transport data, with broader applicability to fluid flow problems where passive scalars can be observed.
I.J. Eliza, X. Huang, A. Panta, A. Sahistan, Z. Li, A.A. Gooch, V. Pascucci.
Animating Petascale Time-varying Data on Commodity Hardware with LLM-assisted Scripting, Subtitled arXiv:2603.07053v1, 2026.
Scientists face significant visualization challenges as time-varying datasets grow in speed and volume, often requiring specialized infrastructure and expertise to handle massive datasets. Petascale climate models generated in NASA laboratories require a dedicated group of graphics and media experts and access to high-performance computing resources. Scientists may need to share scientific results with the community iteratively and quickly. However, the time-consuming trial-and-error process incurs significant data transfer overhead and far exceeds the time and resources allocated for typical post-analysis visualization tasks, disrupting the production workflow. Our paper introduces a user-friendly framework for creating 3D animations of petascale, time-varying data on a commodity workstation. Our contributions: (i) Generalized Animation Descriptor (GAD) with a keyframe-based adaptable abstraction for animation, (ii) efficient data access from cloud-hosted repositories to reduce data management overhead, (iii) tailored rendering system, and (iv) an LLM-assisted conversational interface as a scripting module to allow domain scientists with no visualization expertise to create animations of their region of interest. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness with two case studies: first, by generating animations in which sampling criteria are specified based on prior knowledge, and second, by generating AI-assisted animations in which sampling parameters are derived from natural-language user prompts. In all cases, we use large-scale NASA climate-oceanographic datasets that exceed 1PB in size yet achieve a fast turnaround time of 1 minute to 2 hours. Users can generate a rough draft of the animation within minutes, then seamlessly incorporate as much high-resolution data as needed for the final version.
Y. Epshteyn, A. Narayan, Y. Yu.
Structure-Preserving Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for Stochastic Shallow Water Equations, Subtitled arXiv:2606.07155v1, 2026.
Shallow water equations (SWE) are fundamental models in fluid dynamics that are essential for studying a wide range of geophysical and engineering phenomena. In many practical applications, uncertainties arising from initial conditions and bottom topography must be taken into account, motivating the development of stable and accurate numerical methods for stochastic SWE. Building on the hyperbolicity-preserving stochastic Galerkin formulation for SWE [Dai, Epshteyn, Narayan, 2021 SISC] and a stochastic extension of the entropy stable discontinuous Galerkin methods for skew-symmetric SWE [Fu, 2022 JSC], we develop a structure-preserving, entropy conservative, and entropy stable discontinuous Galerkin--stochastic Galerkin method for the stochastic shallow water system, with the well-balanced property. We demonstrate the accuracy, applicability, and robustness of the proposed structure-preserving algorithms through several numerical experiments.
S.A. Faroughi, F. Mostajeran, A. Arzani, S. Faroughi.
Symbolic--KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks with Discrete Symbolic Structure for Interpretable Learning, Subtitled arXiv:2603.23854, 2026.
Symbolic discovery of governing equations is a long-standing goal in scientific machine learning, yet a fundamental trade-off persists between interpretability and scalable learning. Classical symbolic regression methods yield explicit analytic expressions but rely on combinatorial search, whereas neural networks scale efficiently with data and dimensionality but produce opaque representations. In this work, we introduce Symbolic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (Symbolic-KANs), a neural architecture that bridges this gap by embedding discrete symbolic structure directly within a trainable deep network. Symbolic-KANs represent multivariate functions as compositions of learned univariate primitives applied to learned scalar projections, guided by a library of analytic primitives, hierarchical gating, and symbolic regularization that progressively sharpens continuous mixtures into one-hot selections. After gated training and discretization, each active unit selects a single primitive and projection direction, yielding compact closed-form expressions without post-hoc symbolic fitting. Symbolic-KANs further act as scalable primitive discovery mechanisms, identifying the most relevant analytic components that can subsequently inform candidate libraries for sparse equation-learning methods. We demonstrate that Symbolic-KAN reliably recovers correct primitive terms and governing structures in data-driven regression and inverse dynamical systems. Moreover, the framework extends to forward and inverse physics-informed learning of partial differential equations, producing accurate solutions directly from governing constraints while constructing compact symbolic representations whose selected primitives reflect the true analytical structure of the underlying equations. These results position Symbolic-KAN as a step toward scalable, interpretable, and mechanistically grounded learning of governing laws.
E. Ghelichkhan, T. Tasdizen.
Beyond Standard Sampling: Metric-Guided Iterative Inference for Radiologists-Aligned Medical Counterfactual Generation, In Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 2026.
Generative counterfactuals offer a promising avenue for explainable AI in medical imaging, yet ensuring these synthesized images are both anatomically faithful and clinically effective remains a significant challenge. This work presents a domain-specific diffusion framework for generating ”healthy” counterfactuals from chest X-rays with cardiomegaly, underpinned by a systematic metric-guided inference strategy. In contrast to methods relying on static sampling parameters, our approach iteratively explores the inference hyperparameter space to maximize our composite selection criterion, CF Score, that integrates our novel Faithfulness-Effectiveness Trade-off (F ET ) metric.
We extend the evaluation of counterfactual utility beyond simple classification shifts by conducting the simultaneous validation against radiologist annotations and eye-tracking data. Using the REFLACX dataset, we demonstrate that difference maps derived from our counterfactuals exhibit strong spatial alignment with expert visual attention and annotation. Quantified by Normalized Cross-Correlation, Hit Rate, pixel-wise ROC-AUC, and AUC-IoU, our results confirm that metric-guided counterfactuals provide dense and clinically relevant localizations of pathology that closely mirror human diagnostic reasoning.
M. Al Zadid Sultan Bin Habib, Y. Ahamed, P. Gyawali, G. Doretto, D. A. Adjeroh.
BSTABDIFF: BLOCK-SUBUNIT DIFFUSION PRIORS FOR HIGH-DIMENSIONAL TABULAR DATA GENERA, In e 2nd DeLTa Workshop, ICLR 2026, 2026.
High-Dimensional Low-Sample Size (HDLSS) tabular domains (e.g., omics) are characterized by n ≪ m, where n = number of samples, and m = number of features. Such domains often exhibit strong local correlation groups, sparse cross-group dependencies, heavy-tailed non-Gaussian marginals, heteroscedastic noise, and structured missingness, making direct density learning in Rm ill-conditioned since n ≪ m. We propose BSTabDiff, a block-subunit generative framework that partitions the m observed features into M latent blocks (M ≪ m) and generates each block via a shared low-dimensional subunit variable, concentrating global dependence learning in the compact block-latent space RM while decoding to the full feature space with copula-driven dependence, flexible per-feature marginals, and explicit missingness mechanisms. BSTabDiff supports modern deep priors on block latents, including diffusion and normalizing flows, enabling stable synthesis and controllable benchmark generation in the HDLSS regime. Empirically, BSTabDiff produces more realistic and stable high-dimensional synthetic data when compared with unstructured tabular generators on HDLSS data.
A.Z.S.B. Habib, G. Doretto, D.A. Adjeroh.
DynaTab: Dynamic Feature Ordering as Neural Rewiring for High-Dimensional Tabular Data, In Proceedings of the First Workshop on NeuroAI Multimodal Intelligence @ AAAI, 2026.
High-dimensional tabular data lacks a natural feature order, limiting the applicability of permutation-sensitive deep learning models. We propose DynaTab, a dynamic feature ordering-enabled architecture inspired by neural rewiring. We introduce a lightweight criterion that predicts when feature permutation will benefit a dataset by quantifying its intrinsic complexity. DynaTab dynamically reorders features via a neural rewiring algorithm and processes them through a compact, dynamic order-aware combination of separate learned positional embedding, importance-based gating, and masked attention layers, compatible with any sequence-sensitive backbone. Trained end-to-end with bespoke dynamic feature ordering (DFO) and dispersion losses, DynaTab achieves statistically significant gains, particularly on high-dimensional datasets, where it is benchmarked against 45 state-of-the-art baselines across 36 different real-world tabular datasets. Our results position DynaTab as a compelling new paradigm for high-dimensional tabular deep learning.
A.Z.S.B. Habib, M.Y. Ahamed, P.K. Gyawali, G. Doretto, D.A. Adjeroh.
GOTabPFN: From Feature Ordering to Compact Tokenization for Tabular Foundation Models on High-Dimensional Data, Subtitled arXiv:2606.05441v2, 2026.
We investigate how to make small tabular foundation models effective for High-Dimensional, Low-Sample Size (HDLSS) tabular prediction without retraining large backbones. We introduce Graph-guided Ordering with Local Refinement (GO-LR), show its equivalence to weighted Minimum Linear Arrangement, and interpret the practical solver as a TSP-path-style surrogate. We propose GOTabPFN,which builds on GO-LR, and a Neuro-Inspired Subunit Compression (NSC) unit to pool locally adjacent ordered features into meta-features, yielding a compact representation that makes TabPFN-style prediction practical in HDLSS regimes. Across tabular benchmarks, GOTabPFN improves stability and accuracy under tight token budgets.
A.Z.S.B. Habib, M.Y. Ahamed, P.K. Gyawali, G. Doretto, D.A. Adjeroh.
BSTabDiff: Block-Subunit Diffusion Priors for High-Dimensional Tabular Data Generation, Subtitled arXiv:2606.09257v1, 2026.
High-Dimensional Low-Sample Size (HDLSS) tabular domains (e.g., omics) are characterized by nrong local correlation groups, sparse cross-group dependencies, heavy-tailed non-Gaussian marginals, heteroscedastic noise, and structured missingness, making direct density learning in Rm ill-conditioned since nrating global dependence learning in the compact block-latent space Rm while decoding to the full feature space with copula-driven dependence, flexible per-feature marginals, and explicit missingness mechanisms. BSTabDiff supports modern deep priors on block latents, including diffusion and normalizing flows, enabling stable synthesis and controllable benchmark generation in the HDLSS regime. Empirically, BSTabDiff produces more realistic and stable high-dimensional synthetic data when compared with unstructured tabular generators on HDLSS data.
C. Han, M.M. Tanjim, S. Guo, C. Dierk, K.E. Isaacs, J. Hoffswell.
SlideSAVR: Enabling Live Analysis during Data Presentations via Multimodal Sketching and Voice Input, In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 45, No. 3, Wiley, 2026.
Interpersonal communication in data science can yield sought-after insights, but presentation environments are often not conducive for live analysis, forcing the process to move offline. Through a formative survey with 16 participants, we identified both technical (e.g., complexity of tools) and psychological (e.g., pressure of programming during presentation) factors constraining live data analysis. To enable live analysis, we present SlideSAVR, a data-driven presentation assistant that leverages sketching and voice inputs in live discussion to support collaborative data analysis during presentations. Powered by an agentic framework that flexibly defines augmentation rules, updates slide content dynamically to match the live context, and automates backend computations, SlideSAVR enables fluid audience-presenter interaction and reduces the need for offline reanalysis and follow-up communication. We demonstrate SlideSAVR’s ability to support a range of tasks through nine representative use cases. We further evaluate the system’s accuracy and computation time across different settings, showing that SlideSAVR can reliably perform diverse tasks when provided with both sketch and voice inputs.
M. Rakibul Haque, V. Goudar, S. Elhabian, W.W. Pettine.
TimeSynth: A Framework for Uncovering Systematic Biases in Time Series Forecasting, Subtitled arXiv:2602.11413, 2026.
Time series forecasting is a fundamental tool with wide ranging applications, yet recent debates question whether complex nonlinear architectures truly outperform simple linear models. Prior claims of dominance of the linear model often stem from benchmarks that lack diverse temporal dynamics and employ biased evaluation protocols. We revisit this debate through TimeSynth, a structured framework that emulates key properties of real world time series,including non-stationarity, periodicity, trends, and phase modulation by creating synthesized signals whose parameters are derived from real-world time series. Evaluating four model families Linear, Multi Layer Perceptrons (MLP), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and Transformers, we find a systematic bias in linear models: they collapse to simple oscillation regardless of signal complexity. Nonlinear models avoid this collapse and gain clear advantages as signal complexity increases. Notably, Transformers and CNN based models exhibit slightly greater adaptability to complex modulated signals compared to MLPs. Beyond clean forecasting, the framework highlights robustness differences under distribution and noise shifts and removes biases of prior benchmarks by using independent instances for train, test, and validation for each signal family. Collectively, TimeSynth provides a principled foundation for understanding when different forecasting approaches succeed or fail, moving beyond oversimplified claims of model equivalence.
M.R. Haque, K.M. Sultan, T. Kataria, S. Elhabian.
MedConcept: Unsupervised Concept Discovery for Interpretability in Medical VLMs, Subtitled arXiv:2604.11868, 2026.
While medical Vision-Language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on tasks such as tumor or organ segmentation and diagnosis prediction, their opaque latent representations limit clinical trust and the ability to explain predictions. Interpretability of these multimodal representations are therefore essential for the trustworthy clinical deployment of pretrained medical VLMs. However, current interpretability methods, such as gradient- or attention-based visualizations, are often limited to specific tasks such as classification. Moreover, they do not provide concept-level explanations derived from shared pretrained representations that can be reused across downstream tasks. We introduce MedConcept, a framework that uncovers latent medical concepts in a fully unsupervised manner and grounds them in clinically verifiable textual semantics. MedConcept identifies sparse neuron-level concept activations from pretrained VLM representations and translates them into pseudo-report-style summaries, enabling physician-level inspection of internal model reasoning. To address the lack of quantitative evaluation in concept-based interpretability, we introduce a quantitative semantic verification protocol that leverages an independent pretrained medical LLM as a frozen external evaluator to assess concept alignment with radiology reports. We define three concept scores, Aligned, Unaligned, and Uncertain, to quantify semantic support, contradiction, or ambiguity relative to radiology reports and use them exclusively for post hoc evaluation. These scores provide a quantitative baseline for assessing interpretability in medical VLMs.
M.R. Haque, S. Elhabian, W.W. Pettine.
Timesynth: A Temporal Fidelity Framework for Health Signal Digital Twins, Subtitled arXiv:2607.00431, 2026.
Forecasting models for health-signal digital twins must preserve the oscillatory, frequency, phase, and state-transition dynamics of physiological signals, yet the pointwise metrics used to benchmark them cannot detect when these fundamental properties are lost. We show that this blind spot misranks models: across 11 architectures, models with comparable pointwise error diverge by up to 53° in phase accuracy, equivalent to roughly 123 ms for a 1.2 Hz cardiac rhythm and invisible to standard metrics. To enable development of models that escape such failures, we introduce TimeSynth, a controlled benchmarking framework with two reusable components: a physiologically grounded generator producing signals with analytically known ground-truth dynamics from parametric models fitted to real electroencephalography, electrocardiography and photoplethysmogram signals, along with diagnostics quantifying amplitude, frequency, phase, and state-transition fidelity. Linear and full-sequence attention models systematically lose frequency and phase information despite acceptable amplitude error, whereas architectures with localized temporal structure better preserve dynamical fidelity and adapt to observable state transitions; none, however, reliably preserves stochastic switching. Because the dominant determinant of fidelity is architectural, model choice becomes a principled, use-case-driven decision rather than a search for a single winner. TimeSynth thus supplies the controlled preclinical stress test missing before models are coupled to patient data, with a reusable generator and diagnostics for fidelity-aware development.
J. Hart, B. van Bloemen Waanders, J. Li, T. A. J. Ouermi, C. R. Johnson.
Hyper-differential sensitivity analysis with respect to model discrepancy: Prior distributions, In International Journal for Uncertainty Quantification, Vol. 16, No. 1, Begell House, 2026.
Hyper-differential sensitivity analysis with respect to model discrepancy was recently developed to enable uncertainty quantification for optimization problems. The approach consists of two primary steps: (i) Bayesian calibration of the discrepancy between high- and low-fidelity models, and (ii) propagating the model discrepancy uncertainty through the optimization problem. When high-fidelity model evaluations are limited, as is common in practice, the prior discrepancy distribution plays a crucial role in the uncertainty analysis. However, specification of this prior is challenging due to its mathematical complexity and many hyper-parameters. This article presents a novel approach to specify the prior distribution. Our approach consists of two parts: (1) an algorithmic initialization of the prior hyper-parameters that uses existing data to initialize a hyper-parameter estimate, and (2) a visualization framework to systematically explore properties of the prior and guide tuning of the hyper-parameters to ensure that the prior captures the appropriate range of uncertainty. We provide detailed mathematical analysis and a collection of numerical examples that elucidate properties of the prior that are crucial to ensure uncertainty quantification.
M.A. Hasanat, J. Ludmir, T. Patel, R.B. Roy.
TuniQ: Autotuning Compilation Passes for Quantum Workloads at Scale for Effectiveness and Efficiency, Subtitled arXiv:2605.11375v1, 2026.
Quantum processors are being integrated into HPC ecosystems as co-processors, where compilation of quantum circuits into hardware-executable form determines both output fidelity and runtime. Current compilers use a fixed pass sequence and ignore the fact that optimal pass selection varies with circuit, hardware, and noise conditions. We present TuniQ, a reinforcement learning-based system that selects compilation passes at each pipeline stage, adapting to circuit, backend, and current noise profile. TuniQ introduces several novel design components like a dual-encoder for stage-aware representation, shaped rewards for cross-stage credit assignment, and dynamic action masking for valid compilation. Evaluated across diverse quantum workloads on multiple IBM Quantum Cloud processors, TuniQ improves fidelity and reduces compilation time over the state-of-the-art IBM Qiskit transpiler, generalizes across backends without retraining, and scales strongly to utility-scale circuits with growing advantage.
M.H.H. Hisham, S. Elhabian, G. Adluru, J. Mendes, A. Arai, E. Kholmovski, R. Ranjan, E. DiBella.
Unrolled Reconstruction with Integrated Super-Resolution for Accelerated 3D LGE MRI, Subtitled arXiv:2603.18309v1, 2026.
Accelerated 3D late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) MRI requires robust reconstruction methods to recover thin atrial structures from undersampled k-space data. While unrolled model-based networks effectively integrate physics-driven data consistency with learned priors, they operate at the acquired resolution and may fail to fully recover high-frequency detail. We propose a hybrid unrolled reconstruction framework in which an Enhanced Deep Super-Resolution (EDSR) network replaces the proximal operator within each iteration of the optimization loop, enabling joint super-resolution enhancement and data consistency enforcement. The model is trained end-to-end on retrospectively undersampled preclinical 3D LGE datasets and compared against compressed sensing, Model-Based Deep Learning (MoDL), and self-guided Deep Image Prior (DIP) baselines. Across acceleration factors, the proposed method consistently improves PSNR and SSIM over standard unrolled reconstruction and better preserves fine cardiac structures, leading to improved LA (left atrium) segmentation performance. These results demonstrate that integrating super-resolution priors directly within model-based reconstruction provides measurable gains in accelerated 3D LGE MRI.
Y. Huang, S.H. Wang, A.L. Bertozzi, B. Wang.
RMFlow: Refined Mean Flow by a Noise-Injection Step for Multimodal Generation, Subtitled arXiv:2602.00849, 2026.
Mean flow (MeanFlow) enables efficient, high-fidelity image generation, yet its single-function evaluation (1-NFE) generation often cannot yield compelling results. We address this issue by introducing RMFlow, an efficient multimodal generative model that integrates a coarse 1-NFE MeanFlow transport with a subsequent tailored noise-injection refinement step. RMFlow approximates the average velocity of the flow path using a neural network trained with a new loss function that balances minimizing the Wasserstein distance between probability paths and maximizing sample likelihood. RMFlow achieves near state-of-the-art results on text-to-image, context-to-molecule, and time-series generation using only 1-NFE, at a computational cost comparable to the baseline MeanFlows.
L.T. Hudson, B.L. Vargas, A.E. Anderson, J.A. Weiss.
Effects of Bone Deformation on Patient-Specific Finite Element Predictions of Hip Chondrolabral Mechanics, In Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, Elsevier, 2026.
Patient-specific finite element models of hip cartilage and labrum (chondrolabral) mechanics have improved the understanding of form-function relationships underpinning hip osteoarthritis. While these models often assume the pelvis and femur are rigid bodies to reduce development and computational time, contact stresses may be overestimated when the pelvis and femur cannot deform. Recent advancements in element formulations, constitutive models, and integration of patient-specific boundary/loading conditions warrant a re-examination of this rigid body assumption. We assessed the influence of material representations for the pelvis and femur on finite element predictions of chondrolabral mechanics during level walking and squatting. Four material representations were evaluated: (1) rigid bodies, (2) deformable-inhomogeneous with CT-derived material properties, (3) deformable-two-material with distinct trabecular and cortical bone materials, and (4) deformable-one-material model. Patient-specific kinematics and joint reaction forces for level walking and squatting were derived from motion capture and musculoskeletal models, respectively. During level walking, there were no significant differences between bone material representations for maximum cartilage contact pressure, contact area, shear stress, or first principal strain. During squatting, rigid and one-material models produced significantly higher maximum contact pressures, while other metrics remained unaffected. Rigid models required significantly less computational runtime and memory than deformable models. Our findings indicate rigid bone assumptions suffice for level walking, improving efficiency in large cohort studies, but deformable bone models are likely warranted for activities that produce larger bone deformations such as squatting. This study provides guidance for selecting bone material representations that balance accuracy and computational efficiency in hip biomechanical analyses.
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