Something in the Way They Move
Shinbone to knee bone, knee bone to thighbone. The arrangement of the parts is poetic, but their performance, for some people, can be less than lyrical. At the Hospital for Special Surgery's Leon Root, M.D. Motion Analysis Laboratory, experts evaluate movement and muscle patterns. The information helps physicians decide the kind of clinical intervention—surgery, physical therapy, or a brace, for example—that will best address a particular patient's structural difficulties.
A free-standing slab of concrete 2 feet thick with 10 cameras mounted along its inner perimeter is the lab's nerve center. It rests on dirt, and there is no connection to the building, so vibrations that might interfere with the tests are damped out.
The cameras record patients' movements from reflective markers attached to their bodies and relay the information to computers that analyze in three dimensions how their joints bend as they walk or climb stairs, for example, and whether their muscles are contracting as they should. The patients who come here and the conditions they bring are as different as a child with cerebral palsy and a baseball player with a shoulder injury.
As would be expected, the lab is also a research tool, but a practical one. In one current project, researchers are analyzing gait and muscle strength in knee replacement patients who had either traditional open surgery or minimally invasive surgery. "The hope is that not only is there a smaller scar with minimally invasive surgery but that there's a return to normal function more quickly," says Howard Hillstrom, director of the lab. Less pain, more gain.
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