The department of Experimental anatomy is a basis for fundamental research of topographical, functional and clinical anatomy, polarised around the human body and its body composition.
The EXAN-research department represents three research lines. The research line on joint kinematics focusses on the internal motion mechanisms in human joints with a special interest in the segmental and regional kinematics the cervical spine. The research line on body composition consists of two sublines. One focusses on the methodological aspects and the other on the clinical application of BC techniques. The third line of research is based on anatomical questions raised by the clinical field and has a main focus on anatomical variation and its clinical relevance. Each of this research lines has grown over the past years and has built up its specific expertise.
The department continues to focus on its internal strength which is it’s so called ‘soul’ of macroscopic anatomy. The groups arthrokinematics research will continue to focus on the kinematics of the cervical spine and will use its national (ULB – Université Libre de Bruxelles – LABO ) and international (Università Degli Studii di Genova-Italy and SOMT - Netherlands) collaboration network to continue this work. The functional body composition research will continue to cooperate with national (GERO-VUB, Novartis) and international groups (Pennington Biomedical Research Centre–US, Hanzehogeschool–NL) in the context of muscle quality and quantity assessment. The functional musculoskeletal anatomy research line will focus on cooperation with SOMT (Amersfoort-NL) focusing its studies on the clinical relevance of anatomical variability.