Non-invasive approach towards the in vivo estimation of 3D inter-vertebral movements: methods and preliminary results

A kinematical model of the lower spine was designed and used to obtain a robust estimation of the vertebral rotations during torso movements from skin-surface markers recorded by video-cameras. Markers were placed in correspondence of the anatomical landmarks of the pelvic bone and vertebral spinous and transverse processes, and acquired during flexion, lateral bending and axial motions. In the model calibration stage, a motion-based approach was used to compute the rotation axes and centres of the functional segmental units. Markers were mirrored into virtual points located on the model surface, expressed in the local reference system of coordinates. The spine motion assessment was solved into the domain of extended Kalman filters: at each frame of the acquisition, the model pose was updated by minimizing the distances between the measured 2D marker projections on the cameras and the corresponding back-projections of virtual points located on the model surface. The novelty of the proposed technique rests on the fact that the varying location of the rotation centres of the functional segmental units can be tracked directly during motion computation. In addition, we show how the effects of skin artefacts on orientation data can be taken into account. As a result, the kinematical estimation of simulated motions shows that orientation artefacts were reduced by a factor of at least 50%. Preliminary experiments on real motion confirmed the reliability of the proposed method with results in agreement with classical studies in literature.