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Automated personalization of biomechanical knee model

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Patient-specific biomechanical models of the knee joint can effectively aid in understanding the reasons for pathologies and improve diagnostic methods and treatment procedures. For deeper research of knee diseases, the development of biomechanical models with appropriate configurations is essential. In this study, we mainly focus on the development of a personalized biomechanical model for the investigation of knee joint pathologies related to patellar motion using automated methods.

Methods

This study presents a biomechanical model created for patellar motion pathologies research and some techniques for automating the generation of the biomechanical model. To generate geometric models of bones, the U-Net neural network was adapted for 3D input datasets. The method uses the same neural network for segmentation of femur, tibia, patella and fibula. The total size of the train/validation (75/25%) dataset is 18,183 3D volumes of size \(512\times 512\times 4\) voxels. The configuration of the biomechanical knee model proposed in the paper includes six degrees of freedom for the tibiofemoral and patellofemoral joints, lateral and medial contact surfaces for femur and tibia, and ligaments, representing, among other things, the medial and lateral stabilizers of the knee cap. The development of the personalized biomechanical model was carried out using the OpenSim software system. The automated model generation was implemented using OpenSim Python scripting commands.

Results

The neural network for bones segmentation achieves mean DICE 0.9838. A biomechanical model for realistic simulation of patellar movement within the trochlear groove was proposed. Generation of personalized biomechanical models was automated.

Conclusions

In this paper, we have implemented a neural network for the segmentation of 3D CT scans of the knee joint to produce a biomechanical model for the study of knee cap motion pathologies. Most stages of the generation process have been automated and can be used to generate patient-specific models.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Fedor Loginov for the assistance in processing personalized data.

Funding

The research was funded by Russian Science Foundation Grant 21-71-30023.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marchuk Institute of Numerical Mathematics, Russian Academy of Sciences, 8 Gubkin Str., Moscow, 119333, Russia

    Alexandra Yurova & Yuri Vassilevski

  2. Sechenov University, 8-2 Trubetskaya str., Moscow, 119991, Russia

    Alexey Lychagin, Eugene Kalinsky, Yuri Vassilevski, Mikhail Elizarov & Andrey Garkavi

  3. Center for IT &AI, Sirius University, 1 Olympiyskii pr., Sochi, 354340, Russia

    Yuri Vassilevski

Authors
  1. Alexandra Yurova
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  2. Alexey Lychagin
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  3. Eugene Kalinsky
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  4. Yuri Vassilevski
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  5. Mikhail Elizarov
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexandra Yurova.

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The data were obtained retrospectively from anonymized databases and not generated intentionally for the study. For this type of study, formal consent is not required.

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Appendix A Pseudocode for automated model generation functions

Appendix A Pseudocode for automated model generation functions

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Yurova, A., Lychagin, A., Kalinsky, E. et al. Automated personalization of biomechanical knee model. Int J CARS (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-024-03075-5

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