JointViewer - An Interactive System for Exploring Orthopedic Data

We present JointViewer, a software tool to aid orthopedics researchers in exploring complex, in-vivo joint kinematics. Given bone-geometry data and bone-motion information, JointViewer models and visualizes bone inter-spacing in the joint. Next, it proposes and displays plausible ligament paths which connect bones together. Both types of models are constructed through a distancefield approach. Users can maneuver the bones in a joint for better viewing, see motion relative to a specific bone, or remove bones from a joint. We demonstrate JointViewer’s effectiveness in three applications: examining normal human wrist kinematics, capturing the effect of injury on forearm kinematics, and exploring the kinematic constraints imposed by ligaments in a pigeon shoulder. In all applications, the system effectively highlights subtle yet important relationships among bones and soft-tissue that in previous standard joint visualizations had gone unnoticed.