Development and applications of a software tool for diarthrodial joint analysis

This paper describes a new software environment for advanced analysis of diarthrodial joints. The new tool provides 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 fiber strain. Motion trajectories can be also analysed through the calculation of helical axes, instantaneous rotations, and displacements in specific user-chosen coordinate reference frames.The software has an user-friendly graphical interface to display four-dimensional data (time-space data) obtained from medical images, navigation systems, spatial linkages or digitalizers, and can also generate printable reports and multiple graphs as well as ASCII files that can be imported to spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel.1