Mitigating stress: exploring how our feet change shape with size
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If human skeletal shape increases proportionally with size (isometric scaling), we would expect exponential increases in joint contact stress as individuals become larger. However, if skeletal shape changes as a function of size (allometric scaling), this can mitigate increases in joint contact stress by changing the surface area (SA)-to-volume ratio. Here, we explored whether human foot bones scale with allometry and, if so, to identify the shape features that are associated with bone size. Computed tomography scans of the two largest foot bones (talus, calcaneus) were obtained from 36 healthy individuals. We implemented a scaling analysis for each joint articular surface and bone. We performed a Procrustes ANOVA to establish the shape features associated with bone size. In line with our hypothesis, articular surfaces on the calcaneus scaled with positive allometry relative to bone volume, whereas total bone SA scaled with negative allometry. This indicates that articular surfaces grew at a faster rate than the overall bone SA. Interestingly, the calcaneus appeared more cube-like with increasing size. This may be important for the mitigation of internal bone stresses with increasing skeletal size. Our findings suggest distinct but varied scaling strategies within the foot. This may reflect the requirement to maintain healthy joint contact and internal bone stresses with increasing size.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".