This thesis describes a system to record and visualise in-vivo human lumbar spinal kinematics. As well, an extensive method to quantify the system's accuracy and reliability is detailed within. A data acquisition system measures lumbar motion associated with exercises similar to daily activities (gait, ranging, and load lifting). This involves a minimally invasive procedure to insert pins into three spinous processes of the lumbar vertebrae. Three-dimensional electromagnetic position sensors are attached to these pins and stereo radiographs provide the calibration offsets necessary for the calculation of spinal segmental motion from the sensor data. Analysis software was written to aid researchers in extracting descriptive statistics and by displaying 2-D graphs of the segmental motion. As an adjunct to the analysis software, a method was developed to visualise the subject's kinematics using 3-D computer animation. This requires the subject to undergo magnetic resonance volume scans which yields vertebral surface data. This data and the previously acquired kinematics from the same person is combined through computer animation resulting in an intuitive visualisation of their spine's motion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.20216 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Rubin, Richard K. |
| Contributors | Peters, Terry (advisor), Aebi, Max (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Engineering (Department of Biomedical Engineering.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001604771, proquestno: MQ44038, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
Page generated in 0.0016 seconds