Quantitative assessment of skin-bone movement at the knee

Abstract

Thick soft tissue and structures involved in the knee's function surround the knee thus hiding the underlying kinematics. This makes diagnosis of pathologies and analysis of biomechanics difficult. This study accurately quantifies the relative movement between skin and the underlying bone, via X-ray flouroscopy and a mathematical model, in the interest of improving non-invasive knee movement analysis methods. It was found that skin-bone movement varies significantly over both medial and lateral femoral condyles (from 2 to 17 mm rms) and is, therefore, the greatest obstacle by far to obtaining accurate movement data non-intrusively. Data from the proposed method is fundamental to improving acquisition methods for knee biomechanics and prosthetic analysis and can help in understanding soft tissue movement for orthotic analysis.