Tracking of the flexion-extension movement of the cervical vertebrae using fluoroscopy

The aim of this paper is to describe and quantify the entire flexion-extension motion of the cervical spine. To obtain the information required to describe and quantify the entire movement, fluoroscopy recordings of three healthy individuals were made. All of the test subjects had a record of their flexion-extension movement viewed in the sagittal plane. The fluoroscopy recordings were analyzed by tracking the flexionextension movement of the cervical vertebrae. The algorithm used mutual information to match the intensities between the analyzed frames in a multiresolution optimization framework to align the images. The kinematic parameter rotation, was extracted. The global rotation of each vertebra was measured and based on that, the intervertebral range of motion was calculated. The data recorded during this study indicated that the movement pattern between subjects seem to be very different. However, having only three test subjects it is not possible to give a definitive answer.