A Preliminary Scanning Electron Microscope Examination of Wear Striation Direction on Primate Teeth

Wear striations experimentally produced on initially unworn teeth were examined at high magnification using a scanning electron microscope. Certain characteristics of individual wear striations on these teeth indicate the direction of motion that produced them. Other striations on worn teeth of American Indians and the Paleocene primate Phenocolemur show similar characteristics and correspond to mandibular movement during mastication.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67344/2/10.1177_00220345790580011401.pd

Efficient 3D Finite Element Modeling of a Muscle-Activated Tongue

We describe our investigation of a fast 3D finite element method (FEM) for biomedical simulation of a muscle-activated human tongue. Our method uses a linear stiffness-warping scheme to achieve simulation speeds which are within a factor 10 of real-time rates at the expense of a small loss in accuracy. Muscle activations are produced by an arrangement of forces acting along selected edges of the FEM geometry. The model's dynamics are integrated using an implicit Euler formulation, which can be solved using either the conjugate gradient method or a direct sparse solver. To assess the utility of this model, we compare its accuracy against slower, but less approximate, simulations of a reference tongue model prepared using the FEM simulation package ANSYS