A comparison of the 3D kinematic measurements obtained by single-plane 2D-3D image registration and RSA

3D computed tomography (CT) to single-plane 2D fluoroscopy registration is an emerging technology for many clinical applications such as kinematic analysis of human joints and image-guided surgery. However, previous registration approaches have suffered from the inaccuracy of determining precise motion parameters for out-of-plane movements. In this paper we compare kinematic measurements obtained by a new 2D-3D registration algorithm with measurements provided by the gold standard Roentgen Stereo Analysis (RSA). In particular, we are interested in the out-of-plane translation and rotations which are difficult to measure precisely using a single plane approach. Our experimental results show that the standard deviation of the error for out-of-plane translation is 0.42 mm which compares favourably to RSA. It is also evident that our approach produces very similar flexion/extension, abduction/adduction and external knee rotation angles when compared to RSA.