Instantaneous screws of weight-bearing knee: what can the screws tell us about the knee motion.

There are several ways to represent a given object's motion in a 3D space having 6DOF i.e., three translations and three rotations. Some of the methods that are used are mathematical and do not provide any geometrical insight into the nature of the motion. Screw theory is a mathematical, while at the same time, geometrical method in which the 6DOF motion of an object can be represented. We describe the 6DOF motion of a weight-bearing knee by its screw parameters, that are extracted from 3D Optical Reflective motion capture data. The screw parameters which describe the transformation of the shank with respect to the thigh in each two successive frames, is represented as the instantaneous screw axis of the motion given in its Plücker line coordinate, along with its corresponding pitch and intensity values. Moreover, the Striction curve associated with the motion provides geometrical insight into the nature of the motion and its repeatability. We describe the theoretical background and demonstrate what the screw can tell us about the motion of healthy subjects' knee.