Determination of representative dimension parameter values of Korean knee joints for knee joint implant design.

Knee joint implants developed by western companies have been imported to Korea and used for Korean patients. However, many clinical problems occur in knee joints of Korean patients after total knee joint replacement owing to the geometric mismatch between the western implants and Korean knee joint structures. To solve these problems, a method to determine the representative dimension parameter values of Korean knee joints is introduced to aid in the design of knee joint implants appropriate for Korean patients. Measurements of the dimension parameters of 88 male Korean knee joint subjects were carried out. The distribution of the subjects versus each measured parameter value was investigated. The measured dimension parameter values of each parameter were grouped by suitable intervals called the ''size group,'' and average values of the size groups were calculated. The knee joint subjects were grouped as the ''patient group'' based on ''size group numbers'' of each parameter. From the iterative calculations to decrease the errors between the average dimension parameter values of each ''patient group'' and the dimension parameter values of the subjects, the average dimension parameter values that give less than the error criterion were determined to be the rep- resentative dimension parameter values for designing knee joint implants for Korean patients.