Eric Jon Perreault
Northwestern University, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Every posture we hold and every movement we make depends on how much force our muscles produce and how stiff they are. Both properties change in almost all movement disorders, including those caused by stroke, cerebral palsy, musculoskeletal injury and pain.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Physiology
Engineering
- Topics
shear wave elastography
ultrasound
muscle stiffness
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Quantify how stress from passive stretching and from active contraction changes shear wave speed along muscle fibers. Compare clinical one-dimensional ultrasound SWE readings with direct stiffness and stress measurements in an animal model.
- Determine how internal variations in stress within several human muscles affect shear wave elastography measurements made with clinically available ultrasound arrays.
- Evaluate a multi-directional shear wave elastography technique for separately measuring muscle stress and stiffness. Test it on 3D-printed biomaterials with known properties, harvested animal muscle and human participants.
More about the research
Even so, there is still no rigorous way to measure muscle force or stiffness without cutting into the body. Being able to measure them would help clinicians track whether rehabilitation is restoring healthy muscle function.
Why it matters
People recovering from stroke, cerebral palsy, musculoskeletal injury or chronic pain often have altered muscle force and stiffness. Currently there is no noninvasive way to measure these properties. A validated ultrasound method could give clinicians quantitative measurements to guide and evaluate rehabilitation. It could also show that conclusions from earlier elastography studies of muscle need to be revisited.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jonathan Realmuto
University of California-Riverside, CA·Engineering
Design soft robotic actuators whose passive mechanical properties enable direct impedance modulation — control of joint stiffness and compliance — drawing on muscle topology, for upper-limb wearable robots arranged parallel to the joints.
Timothy Bigelow
Iowa State University, IA·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether adding lower-amplitude pulses to histotripsy, an ultrasound technique that creates bubble clouds to mechanically destroy cells, reduces cavitation memory and shortens treatment of infected hernia mesh, and measure how exposures affect mesh properties.
Clare Fitzpatrick
Boise State University, ID·Biomedical Engineering
Build a multiscale computational model of the leg that links cortical and spinal control of muscles with muscle physiology, bone and joint mechanics, and the effects of pain on movement.
The school
Northwestern University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 536 research doctorates a year.
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