Complications related to damaged cervical spine movement, can cause chronic conditions such as whiplash, migraine, constant pain in the head and neck, tinnitus etc. Neck pain has a prevalence of 570,000 for men and women in Denmark, with an annual treatment costs of 920 million DKK. Range of motion (ROM) is the range of physiologic intervertebral motion mesured from the neutral position to measure cervical flexion and extension. The flexion and extension motion of the cervical spine has been assumed to be linear and continuous until recently.
Data consisting of 33 participants in flexion, and 32 participants in extension was provided by Aalborg University. In this study, a predictive analysis of a healthy cervical spine movement in flexion and extension direction has been developed. By developing a prediction analysis using the regression model Multiple Linear Regression, all movements of the cervical joint were predicted. This was done by training and testing on all cervical joints. To demonstrate if specific characteristic joints could describe joint motions in the upper part of the cervical spine "C0/C1", "C3/C4" and "C4/C5" were used to estimate the regression. The predicted data set was compared to manually calculated rotations done by a clinician and resulted in a R-squared value of 0.95 across the cervical joints.