A joint kinematics driven model of the pelvic soft tissue artefact

When skin-markers trajectories are used in human movement analysis, compensating for their relative movement with respect to the underlying bone (soft tissue artefact, STA) is essential for accurate bone-pose estimation; information about the artefact is required in the form of a mathematical model. Such model, not available for pelvic artefacts, could allow pelvic STA compensation in routine gait analysis by embedding it in skeletal kinematics estimators and developing ad-hoc optimization problems for the estimate of subject-specific model parameters. It was developed as driven by adjacent body segment kinematics. Model architecture feasibility was tested; its compensation effectiveness was assessed evaluating the error in pelvic orientation after removing the modelled artefact from the measured one. Five volunteers with a wide body mass range (BMI: 22–37) underwent MRI scans to reconstruct subject-specific pelvic digital bone models. Multiple anatomical calibrations performed in different static postures, as occurring during walking and star-arc movements, registering the bone-models with points digitized through stereophotogrammetry over pelvic bony prominences, allowed to define the relevant poses of a pelvis-embedded anatomical coordinate system. Such approach allowed to measure STAs over several pelvic anatomical landmarks, for each posture and subject. Model parameters were estimated by minimizing the least squares difference between measured and modelled STAs. The measured STAs were appropriately modelled with subject-specific calibrations, both in terms of shape (correlation coefficient: median [inter-quartile-range]: 0.72 [0.36]) and amplitude (root mean square residual: 3.0 [3.2] mm). Consequently, the overall error in pelvic orientation vector (5.1 [4.4] deg) was reduced after removing the modelled artefacts (2.5 [1.9] deg).