Clinical applicability of a new 3D portable stereo-photogrammetric opto-electronic device

s / Gait & Posture 42S (2015) S1–S27 S5 Fig. 1. (a) Reference image. Model generated after the manual identification of the relevant anatomical landmarks. (b) Tracked model in a dynamic frame. They wore an underwear garment with a coloured patch applied, and uniformly coloured ankle socks used as segmentalmarkers (for pelvis and feet, respectively). A RGB video camera (Vicon Bonita 720C, 60 fps) was placed laterally to the walkway. Synchronous 3D marker positions were captured with a Vicon system (Bonita10). Markers were positioned according to the Davis protocol [3] (GS). The proposed ML methodology requires a preliminary model calibration step, performed on a reference image of the subject standing upright (Fig. 1a), from which a foot contour model template is automatically identified, while the lateral malleolus, lateral epicondyle and greater trochanter are manually identified [2]. Model templates of the shank and thigh segments are defined bymeans of technical reference points identified on the silhouette contour. The pelvis orientation is assumed to coincidewith the orientation of the segment obtained by interpolating the points extracted from the pelvis patch. For eachgait trial, the silhouette contourof themoving subject was extracted using a background subtraction technique, and the foot and pelvis segmental markers were identified using colour filters. The foot orientation was determined by matching the foot template with the foot current image. The shank and thigh reference points on the deformed silhouette contour were identified for each frame, and the corresponding templates fitted using a SVD procedure (Fig. 1b) [2]. The kinematic estimations provided by theMLmethodwere compared to the GS in terms of correlation coefficient (CC) and root mean square deviation (RMSD). Results: The CC (and RMSD) between the ML and the GS estimations ranged from 0.91 (4.9◦) to 0.98 (7.3◦) for the hip flexextension, from0.94 (5.4◦) to 0.97 (8.3◦) for the knee flex-extension and from0.74 (5.9◦) to0.84 (9.9◦) for theankledorsi-plantarflexion. Discussion: Joint kinematics estimatedusingML showed a good correlation with the GS joint kinematics (0.74≤CC≤0.98), however the relevant errors are clearly larger than those found in healthy adults [2] (up to 9.9◦). This difference can be attributed partly to the children’s body segments small size (particularly for the foot) and in some cases to the presence of the arm swing that reduces the visibility of the pelvis segmental marker. Therefore, the extraction of the segmental markers will have to be improved in order for this method to be applied in clinical settings.