A regularized functional method to determine the hip joint center of rotation in subjects with limited range of motion

Abstract

The symmetrical center of rotation estimation (SCoRE) is probably one of the most used functional method for estimating the hip join center (HJC). However, it requires of complex multi-plane movements to find accurate estimations of HJC. Thus, using SCoRE for people with limited hip range of motion will lead to poor HJC estimation. In this work, we propose an anisotropic regularized version of the SCoRE formulation (RSCoRE), which is able to estimate the HJC location by using only standard gait trials, avoiding the need of recording complex multi-plane movements. RSCoRE is evaluated in both accuracy and repeatability of the estimation as compared to functional and predictive methods on a self-recorded cohort of fifteen young healthy adults with no hip joint pathologies or other disorders that could affect their gait. Given that, no medical images were available for this study, to quantify the global error of HJC the SCoRE residual was used. RSCoRE presents a global error of about 12 mm, similarly to the best performance of SCoRE. The comparison of the coordinate's errors at each coordinate indicates that HJC estimations from SCoRE with complex multi-plane movements and RSCoRE are not statistical significantly different. Finally, we show that the repeatability of RSCoRE is similar to the rest of the tested methods, yielding to repeatability values between 0.72 and 0.79. In conclusion, not only the RSCoRE yields similar estimation performance than SCoRE, but it also avoids the need of complex multi-plane movements to be performed by the subject of analysis. For this reason, RSCoRE has the potential to be a valuable approach for estimating the HJC location in people with limited hip ROM.