The purpose of this thesis was to establish a procedure for attaining solid models of the human knee to be used in an ongoing study of the optimum knee meniscus configurations during meniscal transplant surgery.
Solid models of the distal end of the femur and the tibial plateau were created to approximate the human knee (tibiofemoral joint). To create these models, points taken from magnetic resonance images (MRI) were first converted to a point cloud with a consistent number of points in each cross section. From here, b-splines were created from the points in each cross section. Finally, these b-splines were lofted together to form a solid model.
A formulation for comparing the generated lofted models to a parametric modeling approach was established. This comparison technique consisted of comparing the models on the basis of both volume and shape. The shape comparison technique established was based on Boolean subtraction.