Vibration arthrometry in patients with knee joint disorders.

Physiological patellofemoral crepitus (PPC) is the vibration signal produced by the knee joint during slow motion (less than 5 degrees per second), which can be measured by vibration arthrometry (VAM). By using the autoregressive (AR) model for the PPC signals of patients with knee osteoarthritis, the study analyzes the PPC signals to evaluate the condition of patellar-femoral joint cartilage. Accordingly, we can divide osteoarthritis into three types, type 1: the cartilage of patellar-femoral joint is intact, the osteoarthritis found in the femoral-tibial joint surface; type 2: degeneration occurs in the surface cartilage of both the femoral-tibial joint and the femoral trochlea, but not on the patellar surface; type 3: both patellar-femoral and femoral-tibial joints have osteoarthritis. For the analysis, the intraclass distance of AR coefficients and spectral power ratio of dominant poles are adopted. Based on the proposed method, two cases of type 1, six of type 2, and 28 of type 3 were found in 36 cases of knee osteoarthritis. This is in agreement with the operative findings. For comparison, the PPC signals of 10 subjects with normal knees (without pain or wound history) were also measured. The results of analysis of the 10 normal subjects were consistent and clearly differentiable from those of the osteoarthritis patients. Therefore, the proposed method is efficient for the analysis of the condition of patellar-femoral joint cartilage and VAM may become an alternative way of noninvasive diagnosis of knee osteoarthritis.