Patient Couch

Medical College of Wisconsin Sports Medicine Motion Analysis Lab

The Sports Medicine Motion Analysis Laboratory is used for developing, validating, and advancing injury prevention and performance enhancement in athletes. This facility is designed to be able to stimulate real-life sports environments such as a pitcher’s mound, golfing tee box, or batting cage so that we can study the motion of the athlete’s body and the forces acting at their joints. By understanding these motions and loads, we can learn to identify athletes at a greater likelihood of injury and measures of performance. The goal is to discover the mechanisms behind injury, rehabilitation, and performance, and apply them to improve the outcomes and optimize performance for the athletes that come through our lab, and to advance sports medicine research as a whole.
Sports Medicine Research

About the Lab

all
Areas of Research
  • Baseball pitching analysis
  • ACL injury studies
  • Biomechanics of landing/cutting/planting techniques among soccer, basketball and volleyball athletes
  • Biomechanics of a batter's swing, golf swing, tennis serve, volleyball spike, speed skaters, and ballet dance
  • Biomechanics of running
Equipment
Equipment in the laboratory includes a Motion Analysis system with 8 Raptor cameras, 2 PointGrey high speed
video cameras, 2 AMTI force plates, F-Scan foot insole pressure measurement system, EMG system, Biodex
extremity evaluation system, Motion Analysis software for data collection and processing, and Matlab software.
Funding
Medical College of Wisconsin Department of Orthopaedic Surgery
Personnel
William Raasch MD (Medical Director) & Janelle Cross PhD (Research Director).
Space
The 1600 square-foot Sports Medicine Motion Analysis Laboratory is located within the Froedtert and Medical
College Sports Medicine Center.