Using two palpable measurements improves the subject-specific femoral modeling

Subject-specific musculoskeletal models are essential to biomedical research and clinical applications, such as customized joint replacement, computer-aided surgical planning, gait analysis and automated segmentation. Generating these models from CT or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is time and resource intensive, requiring special skills. Therefore, in many studies individual bone models are approximated by scaling a generic template. Thus, the primary goal of this study was to determine a set of clinically available parameters (palpable measures and demographic data) that could improve the prediction of femoral dimensions, as compared to predicting these variables using uniform scaling based on palpable length. Similar to previous non-homogenous anthropometric scaling methods, the non-homogenous scaling method proposed in this study improved the prediction over uniform scaling of five key femoral measures. Homogenous scaling forces all dimensions of an object to be scaled equally, whereas non-homogenous scaling allows the dimensions to be scaled independently. The largest improvement was in femoral depth, where the coefficient of determination (r(2)) improved from 0.22 (homogenous) to 0.60 (non-homogeneous). In general, the major advantage of this non-homogenous scaling method is its ability to support the accurate and rapid generation of subject-specific femoral models since all parameters can be collected clinically, without imaging or invasive methods.