A NEW MEASUREMENT METHOD OF FEMORAL ANTEVERSION BASED ON THREE DIMENSIONAL MODELING

3차원 모델링을 이용한 대퇴 전염각의 측정

Femoral neck anteversion is the angle between the neck and the knee axis projected on a plane perpendicular to the longitudinal axis. Conventional methods that use cross-sectional Computed Tomography(CT) images to estimate femoral anteversion have several problems because of the complex 3D structure of the femur. These are the ambiguity of defining the longitudinal axis, the femoral neck axis and condylar line, and the dependence on patient positioning. Especially the femoral neck axis that is known as a major source of error is hard to determine from a single or multiple 2D transverse images. So we developed a new method for measuring femoral anteversion by 3D modeling method. In this method, femoral head is modeled as a sphere. The center of femoral neck is the mid-point of the 2D reconstructed oblique image in the femoral neck part. Then neck axis is a line connecting foregoing two centers. We model the longitude of femur as a cylinder, and the long axis is defined from the fitted cylinder. The knee axis which is tangent to the back of the femoral condyles is easily determined by table-top method. By the definition of femoral anteversion, the femoral anteversion is easily calculated from this model.