Health, Technology and Society are cardinal strands for socio-economic development and their essentiality is reflected in the Millennium Development Goals. Every year governments designate a significant chunk of their public revenue towards burgeoning of healthcare infrastructure.
Social and economic inequality is detrimental to the health of any society. Especially when the society is diverse, multicultural, overpopulated and undergoing rapid but unequal economic growth. The fact that more than 15 million people in India are affected from knee related issues every year has inspired us to focus on this crippling issue and develop an indigenous solution. Health experts believe that the high cost of imported knee implants makes the option of a knee-replacement surgery out of the reach of the middle class.
Medical practice and life sciences take full advantage of progress in engineering disciplines in particular the computer assisted placement technique in hip surgery. Collaborations between the medical and engineering communities in design and implantation of total joint replacements provide a means to restore function to a degraded human joint.
One of the significant challenges of the project is the reconstruction of the human femur and tibia joint from MRI images. This can be done with the support provided from various coding languages and tools.
For instance, coordinates of MRI images can be read and extracted with help of Java. Taking these coordinates as their input Matlab and OpenGL can easily construct a 3-D wire-mesh/wireframe models and provide precise measurements of implant alignment during total knee arthroplasty, thereby reducing the risk of component mal-positioning and femoral-tibial neck notching.
This report provides a clear description of the concepts that underlie knee replacement and our approach towards this project. All the findings are presented using intuitive descriptions and important theoretical results are covered using well labelled diagrams and examples.