Statistical shape-kinematics models of the skeletal joints: Application to the shoulder complex

Patient-specific biomechanical simulations of joints require accurate reconstruction of bony anatomy from medical image data. The articular geometries of the joints may influence their biomechanics. Statistical shape models (SSMs) have become ubiquitous in the literature and aim to capture the natural variation of biological objects. They work by learning the variation from training examples to define the space of valid biological shapes. However, the kinematic information descriptive of the anato-physiological relationship of two interacting objects is not generally encoded in the SSM. Here, we propose a framework for developing combined statistical shape and kinematics models (SSKMs) as Gaussian process morphable models to analyse the shape and kinematics relationship. We demonstrate the framework on a three-dimensional (3D) image data set consisting of ten right-handed cadaveric shoulder joints acquired using computed tomography. Additionally, we simulate specific bone motions to encode kinematics in the combined model. Our SSKM built from shoulder data (matching scapulae and humeri) correctly depicts a correlation between the shape and kinematics as hypothesized. We furthermore demonstrate the ability to marginalize from the SSKM to obtain shape only variation and kinematics-only variation. Future work aims to use the SSKM framework to understand the relationships between kinematics and shape for various joints as well as to develop patient-specific computational models to evaluate joint biomechanics.