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Acquisition and analysis of three-dimensional movement of knee joint is desired in orthopedic surgery. We have developed two methods to obtain dynamic volume images of knee joint. One is a 2D/3D registration method combining a bi-plane dynamic X-ray fluoroscopy and a static three-dimensional CT, the other is a method using so-called 4D-CT that uses a cone-beam and a wide 2D detector. In this paper, we present two analyses of knee joint movement obtained by these methods: (1) transition of the nearest points between femur and tibia (2) principal component analysis (PCA) of six parameters representing the three dimensional movement of knee. As a preprocessing for the analysis, at first the femur and tibia regions are extracted from volume data at each time frame and then the registration of the tibia between different frames by an affine transformation consisting of rotation and translation are performed. The same transformation is applied femur as well. Using those image data, the movement of femur relative to tibia can be analyzed. Six movement parameters of femur consisting of three translation parameters and three rotation parameters are obtained from those images. In the analysis (1), axis of each bone is first found and then the flexion angle of the knee joint is calculated. For each flexion angle, the minimum distance between femur and tibia and the location giving the minimum distance are found in both lateral condyle and medial condyle. As a result, it was observed that the movement of lateral condyle is larger than medial condyle. In the analysis (2), it was found that the movement of the knee can be represented by the first three principal components with precision of 99.58% and those three components seem to strongly relate to three major movements of femur in the knee bend known in orthopedic surgery.
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