Knee Angles After Crosstalk Correction With Principal Component Analysis in Gait and Cycling

Principal component analysis (PCA) has been used as a post-hoc method for reducing knee crosstalk errors during gait analysis. PCA minimizes correlations between flexion–extension (FE), abduction–adduction (AA), and internal–external rotation (IE) angles. However, previous studies have not considered PCA for exercises involving knee flexion angles that are greater than those typically experienced during gait. Thus, the goal of this study was to investigate using PCA to correct for crosstalk during one exercise (i.e., cycling) that involves relatively high flexion angles. Fifteen participants were tested in gait and cycling using a motion analysis system. Uncorrected FE, AA and IE angles were compared to those calculated with PCA performed on (1) all angles (FE-AA-IE PCA correction) and (2) only FE-AA angles (FE-AA PCA correction). Significant differences existed between uncorrected and FE-AA-IE PCA corrected AA and IE angles for both exercises, between uncorrected and FE-AA PCA corrected AA angles for both exercises, and between FE-AA-IE and FE-AA PCA corrected IE angles for cycling. Correlations existed before PCA correction and were eliminated following PCA correction with the exception that FE-IE correlations remained following FE-AA PCA correction. Since the two PCA analyses differed only in their IE angle predictions for the high flexion exercise (cycling), IE angle results were compared to previous studies. Using FE-AA PCA correction may be the preferred protocol for cycling as it appeared to retain physiological IE angle correlations at high flexion angles. However, there exists a critical need for studies aimed at obtaining more accurate IE angles in such exercises.