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Project

Radiation-free Diagnostic and Assessment Tools for Spine Surgery (Radar-Spine)

The etiology of many musculoskeletal diseases is related to biomechanical factors. The pathological changes occurring in the joint will reflect in the abnormal movement patterns (kinematics). However, the tools to measure the motion patterns of the patients used by clinicians and researchers are often crude and subjective leading to sub-optimal patient analyses and cure. Image-based techniques (CT, MRI, X-ray) are often just “static images”, which are difficult to adequately quantify human joint movement. The lacking of dynamic information of the joint leads to an insufficient understanding of normal and pathological joint functions. Subsequently, it might significantly interrupt diagnosis and affect the assessing the outcomes of orthopedic surgery. Due to the complex anatomical structure of spine, accurate kinematic measurement of the spine is very challenging under dynamic conditions. In this project, innovations related to imaging, sensor technology, biomechanical and statistical pose priors are utilized to generate versatile, accurate and objective methods to quantify kinematics of the spine of patients in a unique manner. This project will produce pre-operative diagnostic and post-operative outcome tools which allow clinician and researcher to make proper pre-planning and to alter surgical treatment in an even better fashion. The envisioned tools will pave the way towards a non-radiative solution to monitor real-time spine kinematics for spine surgery.

Date:1 Jan 2020 →  31 Dec 2023
Keywords:Spine Surgery, Radiation-free Diagnostic and Assessment Tools
Disciplines:Musculo-skeletal systems, Biomechanics, Modelling and simulation, Biomedical signal processing, Device biomechanics