Comprehensive Analysis of Joints from Patient Clinical Data

We describe comprehensive analysis tools for human joints, such as knees, hips, and hands. The tools construct solid models of the bone geometry from computer tomography images, analyze the contacts between pairs of interacting bones, simulate the rigid body dynamics of the joint, compute the bone stresses, and visualize the results with 3D, interactive graphics. The user provides the computer tomography data, material properties, and driving forces. The tools simulate the joint physics with minimal user intervention and compute at interactive speed despite the great size of the data sets. They support non-invasive diagnostics, systematic preoperative planning, custom prosthesis design, quantitative models of strain injuries, and medical education software.