An anthropometric scaling method with application to the knee joint

Abstract

This study is concerned with the development of an anthropometric scaling technique, with application to the human knee joint. The locations of soft tissue origins and insertions from a dissected limb are scaled to their relative positions which are inaccessible in the human subject limb, with the differences in geometry being modeled by a homogeneous deformation. This provides a spatial distribution of forces acting on the human subject limb, so that a force analysis may be performed at a particular static phase of a motion. Inherent in this method is a mathematical description of the rigid body motion of a body segment. The mathematical accuracy of the method was examined by scaling known geometries. The scaling scheme was then applied to dry skeletal tibias and femurs and its accuracy and sensitivity to various factors checked by comparison with direct measurements. The proposed method was compared with scaling by uniform dilatation, a scaling technique employed by Morrison (1970), and no scaling at all.