During a clinical study the AEA (Acoustic Emission Analysis) of arthritic defects in the knee joint was enhanced by the addition of kinetic measurement data. This enhanced AEA based method permits a non-invasive diagnosis and assessment of arthritic joint damage at an early stage. The diagnostic procedure includes three separate measurements that contribute in different ways to an extended diagnosis of the disease pattern [1, 2, 3]. During a series of three knee bends a force plate provides data of the ground force while a video-based gait analysis records the corresponding movement and the angles of hip-, knee-, and ankle joints. At the same time AEA detects the acoustic anomalies of damaged cartilage and the absolute angle of the system. The patterns of the kinetic data were analyzed to define the instants of time to correlate the data of the 3 measurement systems. The analysis of the force data yields a pattern with 8 phases. By means of the stance phase between the knee bends the instants of time are used to synchronize force and video based data. In the second step the synchronization of video based data was done by means of the absolute angle of the AEA system [4, 5]. The superposition of kinetic data and the acoustic emission permits a preliminary graphic representation and assessment of the measurement data. The procedure will be applied for the analysis of patients in a clinical study
: In patients with arthritic knee joint defects the course of movement, the application of muscle forces and the degree of freedom of the joints of the lower limbs differs significantly from the corresponding data of a healthy proband. The enhanced acoustic-kinetic joint analysis based on AEA, ground force reaction measurements and video enhanced gait analysis permits the correlation of force data, joint angles and acoustic emission significant of defective joint cartilage regions. This diagnostic procedure permits a quantifiable and detailed non invasive diagnosis of lesion patterns in the arthritic knee joint by means of a synchronization algorithm. The AEA shows lesion signals in the first and third knee bend of the patient. The lesion signals are assigned to the joint angles and ground reaction force. Comparing the kinematical data there is a shift between the curves of the hip and the knee angle. Overall the force data represent an imbalance between the left and the right leg during the knee bends. The presentation of the three measurement systems, the method, the synchronization of the data sets and their final assessment as well as the occurring difficulties during a case of a clinical study are discussed. This would be helpful regarding further patients of the clinical study
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