Patients with chronic knee injuries and diseases suffer from various symptoms such as pain and instability during dynamic activities. With the overall complexity of human joint motion, for purposes of accurate diagnosis and effective treatment, it is critical to study three dimensional (3D) joint motion during dynamic activities. Furthermore, the method used needs to have enough accuracy to analyse detailed joint movement; i.e., movement in the frontal, and transverse planes. However, most of the current knowledge relies on either motion analysis using surface markers, which suffers from measurement inaccuracy due to soft tissue movement artifact ; or analysis of Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) obtained in quasi static conditions, i.e., in non-functional settings. Therefore, the results of such studies may not be generalizable to actual conditions.
To overcome these methodological challenges, a novel methodology, using combined imaging modalities of CT, MRI, and fluoroscopy and 3D-to-2D registration techniques, has recently been described and reported to have high accuracy. A few studies have previously used this method to measure tibiofemoral joint kinematics in patients with ligamentous injuries of the knee. Recently a methodological study reported high accuracy of this method for measuring patellofemoral joint (PFJ) kinematics. In this study, we propose to employ this novel method to investigate patellofemoral joint kinematics (patellar tracking) in a population of subjects with a very common and challenging knee disorder “Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome (PFPS)”, as compared with an asymptomatic control group of subjects without PFPS. The project is in collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine who will be responsible for collection the data and analyzing the results from a medical point-of-view.
