Relationship Between Cervical, Thoracic, and Lumbar Spinal Alignments in Automotive Seated Posture

Fusako Sato; Yusuke Miyazaki; Shigehiro Morikawa; Antonio Ferreiro Perez; Sylvia Schick; Kunio Yamazaki; Karin Brolin; Mats Y Svensson

doi:10.1115/1.4045111

Relationship Between Cervical, Thoracic, and Lumbar Spinal Alignments in Automotive Seated Posture

J Biomech Eng. 2019 Dec 1;141(12):121006. doi: 10.1115/1.4045111.

Authors

Fusako Sato¹, Yusuke Miyazaki², Shigehiro Morikawa³, Antonio Ferreiro Perez⁴, Sylvia Schick⁵, Kunio Yamazaki⁶, Karin Brolin⁷, Mats Y Svensson⁷

Affiliations

¹ Safety Research Division,Japan Automobile Research Institute, Karima 2530, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0822, Japan; Department of Mechanics and Maritime Sciences,Chalmers University of Technology,Gothenburg SE-412 96, Sweden.
² Department of Systems and Control Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1 Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan.
³ Shiga University of Medical Science, Seta Tsukinowa-cho, Otsu, Shiga 530-2192, Japan.
⁴ Fundación de Investigación HM Hospitales, Avenida de Montepríncipe No. 25, Boadilla del Monte, Madrid 28660, Spain.
⁵ Department of Forensic Epidemiology, Institute of Legal Medicine, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, P.O. Box 151023, München, D-80046, Germany.
⁶ Safety Research Division, Japan Automobile Research Institute, Karima 2530, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0822, Japan.
⁷ Department of Mechanics and Maritime Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg SE-412 96, Sweden.

PMID: 31596923
DOI: 10.1115/1.4045111

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spinal alignments in one automotive occupant seated posture. An image dataset of the spinal column in the automotive seated posture, previously acquired by an upright open magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system, was re-analyzed in this study. Spinal alignments were presented by the geometrical centers of the vertebral bodies extracted from the image data. Cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spinal alignments were analyzed separately with multidimensional scaling (MDS). Based on distribution maps of cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spinal alignments created by MDS, representative spinal alignment patterns of the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spines and the relationship between cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spinal alignments were investigated. As a result, this study found a correlation between cervical and thoracic spinal alignments in an automotive occupant seated posture. According to representative spinal alignment patterns illustrated by the distribution map of spinal alignments, subjects who had kyphotic cervical spinal alignment tended to have less kyphotic thoracic spinal alignment, while subjects who had lordotic cervical spinal alignment tended to have more kyphotic thoracic spinal alignment. For lumbar spinal alignments, no prominent relationship was found between cervical and thoracic spinal alignment in the seated condition of this study.