In vivo verification of different hip joint center estimation methods in gait analysis for healthy subjects

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Makina Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2014

Öğrenci: ABDOLLAH YOUSEFI

Danışman: ERGİN TÖNÜK

Özet:

Hip joint is one of the most stable joints in human body. It has intrinsic stability provided by its relatively rigid ball and socket configuration. The hip joint also has a wide range of motion, which allows normal locomotion and daily activities. Location of hip joint center (HJC) is an important parameter in gait analysis, biomechanical and clinical research laboratories to calculate human lower extremity kinematics and kinetics. There exists different methods to determine HJC. Although invasive methods like radiography, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and the like may be used to determine the location of HJC, in gait analysis laboratories, non-invasive functional and/or predictive methods are generally found to be more advantageous. METU gait analysis system, utilizes one of the predictive methods, the Davis method (1991) to determine hip joint center location. Kafalı (2007) adopted two functional methods of hip joint center estimation to the system and evaluated the results with respect to Davis method. This thesis aims to experimentally verify different HJC estimation methods with those obtained from MRI in healthy subjects for the purpose of demonstrating and validating the contribution of MRI procedure in METU gait analysis system. Also combination of Bell’s (1990) second method in posterior (x) direction, Davis (1991) method in distal (y) direction and Bell’s (1990) second method in medial (z) direction was analyzed and the results were criticized for the accuracy.