Author : Ravikant Kamal and D. Ashok Kumar

Osteoarthritis is the disease which occurs due to degeneration of the cartilages. The disease cannot be completely cured but the total knee replacement implants can delay the degeneration and reduces the pain in osteoarthritis case. Modeling of natural knee and designing the knee implant have been tried earlier using a CAD model but the accuracy of the model was compromised in terms of matching the exact geometry of the knee. Due to constantly varying curvature of medial and lateral condyle for every person, the knee implant design requires a reverse engineering approach in order to design an accurate knee implant for the patients. In this paper, CT/MRI images were used as an input data for modeling of the knee which has produced an accurate model of the distal femur and proximal tibia using MIMICS software. Segmentation using reliable profile line function was used in order to achieve an exact 2D surface which was further stacked together to convert it into 3D geometry. Custom made design for the knee bone was attempted here, which mimics the exact curvature required for the specific patient. The knee model and the custom made design were also meshed in case of further finite element analysis .

Keywords: Mimics, Profile Line, Reverse Engineering, Segmentation.

Article published in International Journal of Current  Engineering  and Technology, Vol.3,No.2 (June- 2013)