Abstract
The bicipital groove of the proximal humerus is formed by the medial and lateral tuberosities and serves to retain the long biceps tendon in its proper place as the arm moves. Bicipital root and proximal tendon disorders are an important symptom generator in the shoulder. The accuracy of the diagnosis of many shoulder disorders visually without quantitative shape analysis is limited, motivating a clinical need for some ancillary method to assess the proximal biceps. In previous studies, measurements of bicipital groove shape were 2-dimensional (2D), taken from a single axial slice. Because of significant variations in groove shape from one axial slice to another in a single patient, such approaches risk overlooking shape features important to long biceps tendon pathology. In this paper, we present a study of the relationship between bicipital groove shape and long biceps tendon pathology using a novel 3-dimensional (3D) shape descriptor for the bicipital groove. In addition to providing quantitative measures of the shape of the groove and its relation to tendopathy, the new descriptor allows for intuitive, descriptive visualization of the shape of the groove.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bateman JE: The Shoulder and Neck. USA: W. B. Saunders Company, 1978
Meyer AW: Spontaneous dislocation and destruction of tendon of long head of biceps brachii. Fifty-nine instances. Arch Surg 17:493–506, 1928
Hitchcock HH, Bechtol CO: Painful shoulder. Observations on the role of the tendon of the biceps brachii in its causation. J Bone Jt Surg Am 30A:263–273, 1948
Ueberham K, Le Floch-Prigent P: Intertubercular sulcus of the humerus: biometry and morphology of 100 dry bones. Surg Radiol Anat 20(5):351–354, 1998
Pfahler M, Brenner S, Refior H: The role of the bicipital groove in tendopathy of the long biceps tendon. J Bone Jt Surg 8(5):419–424, 1999
Ahovuo J: Radiographic anatomy of the intertubercular groove of the humerus. Eur J Radiol 5(2):83–86, 1985
Robertson DD, Yuan J, Bigliani LU, Flatow EL, Yamaguchi K: Three-dimensional analysis of the proximal part of the humerus: relevance to arthroplasty. J Bone Jt Surg Am 82-A(11):1594–1602, 2000
Itamura J, Dietrick T, Roidis N, Shean C, Chen F, Tibone J: Analysis of the bicipital groove as a landmark for humeral head replacement. J Bone Jt Surg 11(4):322–326, 2002
Blum H: A transformation for extracting new descriptors of shape. In: Whaten-Dunn W Ed. Models for the Perception of Speech and Visual Form. Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 1967, pp 362–380
Pizer S, Fletcher PT, Joshi S, Thall A, Chen JZ, Fridman Y, Fritsch DS, Gash AG, Glotzer JM, Jiroutek MR, Lu C, Muller KE, Tractor G, Yushkevich P, Chaney EL: Deformable M-reps for 3D medical image segmentation. IJCV 55(2–3):85–106, 2003
Heijden F, Duin RPW, Ridder D, Tax DMJ: Classification, Parameter Estimation and State Estimation: An Engineering Approach Using Matlab. USA: John Wiley and Sons, 2004
van Leersum M, Schweitzer ME: Magnetic resonance imaging of the biceps complex. Magn Reson Imaging Clin N Am 1(1):77–86, 1993
Cervilla V, Schweitzer ME, Ho C, Motta A, Kerr R, Resnick D: Medial dislocation of the biceps brachii tendon: appearance at MR imaging. Radiology 180(2):523–526, 1991
Jain AK: Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing. USA: Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1989
Duda RO, Hart PE: Use of the Hough transformation to detect lines and curves in pictures. Commun ACM 15:11–15, 1972
Goodall C: Procrustes methods in the statistical analysis of shape. J R Stat Soc B 53(2):285–339, 1991
Jolliffe IT: Principal Components Analysis. New York, USA: Springer-Verlag, 1986
Sadjadi FA, Hall EL: Three-dimensional moment invariants. IEEE PAMI 2(2):127–136, 1980
Delft University of Technology: PRTools 4. http://www.prtools.org, 2005
Fukunaga K: Introduction to Statistical Pattern Recognition, 2nd edition. Boston: Academic Press, 1990
The MathWorks, Inc.: Matlab 7.0.4.365 R14 SP2, 1984–2005
Selveraj KG, Selvakuhmarb V, Indrasingh I, Chandib G: Handedness identification from intertubercular sulcus of the humerus by discriminant function analysis. Forensic Sci Int 98:101–108, 1998
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ward, A.D., Hamarneh, G. & Schweitzer, M.E. 3D Bicipital Groove Shape Analysis and Relationship to Tendopathy. J Digit Imaging 21, 219–234 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-007-9027-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-007-9027-6