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Rapid developments have taken place in biological/biomedical measurement and imaging technologies as well as in computer analysis and information technologies. The increase in data obtained with such technologies invites the reader into a virtual world that represents realistic biological tissue or organ structures in digital form and allows for simulation and what is called “in silico medicine.” This volume is the third in a textbook series and covers both the basics of continuum mechanics of biosolids and biofluids and the theoretical core of computational methods for continuum mechanics analyses. Several biomechanics problems are provided for better understanding of computational modeling and analysis. Topics include the mechanics of solid and fluid bodies, fundamental characteristics of biosolids and biofluids, computational methods in biomechanics analysis/simulation, practical problems in orthopedic biomechanics, dental biomechanics, ophthalmic biomechanics, cardiovascular biomechanics, hemodynamics, cell mechanics, and model-, rule-, and image-based methods in computational biomechanics analysis and simulation. The book is an excellent resource for graduate school-level engineering students and young researchers in bioengineering and biomedicine.

The picture on the front cover of this book depicts a young man pulling a fishnet, a task of practical relevance for many centuries. It is a complex task, involving load transmission throughout the body, intricate balance, and eye­ head-hand coordination. The quest toward understanding how we perform such tasks with skill and grace, often in the presence of unpredictable pertur­ bations, has a long history. However, despite a history of magnificent sculptures and drawings of the human body which vividly depict muscle ac­ tivity and interaction, until more recent times our state of knowledge of human movement was rather primitive. During the past century this has changed; we now have developed a considerable database regarding the com­ position and basic properties of muscle and nerve tissue and the basic causal relations between neural function and biomechanical movement. Over the last few decades we have also seen an increased appreciation of the impor­ tance of musculoskeletal biomechanics: the neuromotor system must control movement within a world governed by mechanical laws. We have now col­ lected quantitative data for a wealth of human movements. Our capacity to understand the data we collect has been enhanced by our continually evolving modeling capabilities and by the availability of computational power. What have we learned? This book is designed to help synthesize our current knowledge regarding the role of muscles in human movement. The study of human movement is not a mature discipline.