Research
Clinical gait analysis at UZ Leuven (Pellenberg) has seen rapid development since the opening of the lab in 1996. Each patient needs to be evaluated individually, assessing his strengths and weaknesses. This is best done in a multi-disciplinary team of health professionals with substantial input from the patient or the parents. With the professional instrumentation and the expertise of the team, we feel confident that we can help our patients to reach their full potential.
However it is also extremely important for us, as health professionals, to always examine the premises that we base our treatment interventions upon. We are held on the quest of quality improvement by the ethics of our professional associations. We should always be evaluating to see if our treatment is effective and constantly be looking for ways to improve it.
Therefore the clinical motion analysis lab is also the heart of numerous research projects including:
- Evaluation of the influence of integrated multilevel botulinum toxin A treatment on the gait pattern for children with CP
- Evaluation of the gait patterns of specific patient groups (CP with hemiplegia, adults with orthopaedic problems, clubfeet, incomplete paraplegia, parkinson...)
- Evaluation of the influence of different kind of orthoses on gait (for different patient groups)
- Study of typical gait patterns (stiff knee, rotational problems)
- Longitudinal evaluations of gait pattern and study of the natural history of children with CP
- Classification of gait patterns, using cluster analysis
- Study of coordination patterns during normal and pathological gait (synergies)
- Study of normal gait (kinematics, kinetics, EMG)
- Study of energy consumption during gait (normal gait, different patient groups, with and without orthoses, before and after interventions)
- Study of the effect of physiotherapy to improve gait
- Study of the effect of selective dorsal rhizotomy to improve gait
- Musculo-skeletal modelling
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