Computational methods for joint biomechanics

Studies on knee biomechanics starter to help optimizing the results of conventional or assisted surgical procedures, for better understanding injury and healing processes, for validating hypotheses on new surgical techniques.

These studies included the development of knee models for simulation of rehabilitative or daily life actions, for predicting the individual injury risk or for planning surgical reconstruction of anterior cruciate ligament  (see the image aside) or the knee.
Moreover we developed new and dedicated algorithms and methods for computing the knee degrees of freedom (see the image below) and in general for a computerized anatomical an functional analysis of human joints.

The many application-specific computational methods have been extended to a general-purpose environment for standard biomechanical analysis of diarthrodial joints (e.g. human knee, hip, shoulder or elbow), we called StudyJoint.

The final goal of our project is to provide physicians, medical experts or researchers involved in clinical or medical applications, with a free software that allows to compute kinematics or geometrical quantitative parameters without the need of advanced mathematical skills. The tool provides specifically a number of elaboration functions to investigate the joint kinematics, bone anatomy, and ligament and tendon properties. In particular, the shapes and the contact points of the articulating surfaces can be displayed and analysed through 2D user-defined sections and fittings (lines or conics). Ligament behaviour can be evaluated during joint movement, through the computation of elongations,  orientations, and fibre strain. Motion trajectories can be also analysed through the calculation of helical axes, instantaneous rotations, and displacements in specific user-chosen coordinate reference frames.

This tool has been successfully applied to both in-vitro and in-vivo datasets, and the evaluation of joint kinematics in specific clinical cases, such as anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction in knee.
StudyJoint package is available free of charge upon request. A version updated is available for download at this page. Input data transformation or plug-ins for specific acquisition devices can be obtained from the authors within the frame of a research agreement.