A Wireless Visualized Sensing System with Prosthesis Pose Reconstruction for Total Knee Arthroplasty

The surgery quality of the total knee arthroplasty (TKA) depends on how accurate the knee prosthesis is implanted. The knee prosthesis is composed of the femoral component, the plastic spacer and the tibia component. The instant and kinetic relative pose of the knee prosthesis is one key aspect for the surgery quality evaluation. In this work, a wireless visualized sensing system with the instant and kinetic prosthesis pose reconstruction has been proposed and implemented. The system consists of a multimodal sensing device, a wireless data receiver and a data processing workstation. The sensing device has the identical shape and size as the spacer. During the surgery, the sensing device temporarily replaces the spacer and captures the images and the contact force distribution inside the knee joint prosthesis. It is connected to the external data receiver wirelessly through a 432 MHz data link, and the data is then sent to the workstation for processing. The signal processing method to analyze the instant and kinetic prosthesis pose from the image data has been investigated. Experiments on the prototype system show that the absolute reconstruction errors of the flexion-extension rotation angle (the pitch rotation of the femoral component around the horizontal long axis of the spacer), the internal–external rotation (the yaw rotation of the femoral component around the spacer vertical axis) and the mediolateral translation displacement between the centers of the femoral component and the spacer based on the image data are less than 1.73°, 1.08° and 1.55 mm, respectively. It provides a force balance measurement with error less than ±5 N. The experiments also show that kinetic pose reconstruction can be used to detect the surgery defection that cannot be detected by the force measurement or instant pose reconstruction.