Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Faculty of Allied Health Sciences, Kansai University of Welfare Sciences, 3-11-1, Asahigaoka, Kashiwara-City, Osaka, 582-0026, Japan.
Department of Physical Therapy, Faculty of Health Science, Kyoto Tachibana University, Kyoto, Japan.
J Orthop Surg Res. 2023 Mar 19;18(1):214. doi: 10.1186/s13018-023-03693-w.
Spinal alignment evaluation is commonly performed in the clinical setting during rehabilitation. However, there is no simple method for its quantitative measurement. Recently, the depth cameras in Kinect sensors have been employed in various commercial and research projects in the healthcare field. We hypothesized that the time-of-flight technology of the Kinect sensor could be applied to quantitatively evaluate spinal alignment. The purpose of this study was to develop a simple and noninvasive evaluation for spinal alignment using the Kinect sensor and to investigate its validity.
Twenty-four healthy men participated in the study. Measurement outcomes were the thoracic kyphosis and lumbar lordosis angles in the standing position, using a Spinal Mouse, the validity of which has been previously reported, and the Kinect sensor. In the measurement by the Kinect sensor, a program was created to obtain the three-dimensional coordinates of each point within an area marked on the monitor, and the sums of the angles at each vertebral level were calculated for the thoracic and lumbar areas. Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to analyze the relationship between the Kinect sensor and Spinal Mouse measurements of thoracic kyphosis and lumbar lordosis angles.
There was a significant positive and moderate correlation between the thoracic kyphosis measurements taken by each device. Contrarily, there was no significant correlation in the lordosis angle between measurements using the Kinect sensor and Spinal Mouse.
Our results demonstrated the validity of measuring the thoracic kyphosis angle using the Kinect sensor. This indicates that the depth camera in the Kinect sensor is able to perform accurate thoracic alignment measurements quickly and noninvasively.
脊柱排列评估在康复过程中常在临床环境下进行。然而，目前还没有一种简单的方法对其进行定量测量。最近，Kinect 传感器中的深度摄像机已被应用于医疗保健领域的各种商业和研究项目中。我们假设 Kinect 传感器的飞行时间技术可用于定量评估脊柱排列。本研究的目的是开发一种使用 Kinect 传感器进行简单、非侵入性脊柱排列评估的方法，并研究其有效性。
24 名健康男性参与了本研究。采用已被证实有效的 Spinal Mouse 与 Kinect 传感器测量其在站立位时的胸椎后凸角和腰椎前凸角。在 Kinect 传感器的测量中，创建了一个程序以获取在监视器上标记的区域内的每个点的三维坐标，并计算胸腰椎区域每个椎骨水平的角度之和。采用 Pearson 相关系数分析 Kinect 传感器和 Spinal Mouse 测量的胸椎后凸角和腰椎前凸角之间的关系。
两种设备测量的胸椎后凸角之间存在显著的正相关和中度相关性。相反，Kinect 传感器和 Spinal Mouse 测量的腰椎前凸角之间没有显著相关性。
我们的结果表明，使用 Kinect 传感器测量胸椎后凸角具有有效性。这表明 Kinect 传感器中的深度摄像机能够快速、非侵入性地进行准确的胸椎排列测量。
