Abstract
Understanding of tibiofemoral joint mechanics at multiple spatial scales is essential for developing effective preventive measures and treatments for both pathology and injury management. Currently, there is a distinct lack of specimen-specific biomechanical data at multiple spatial scales, e.g., joint, tissue, and cell scales. Comprehensive multiscale data may improve the understanding of the relationship between biomechanical and anatomical markers across various scales. Furthermore, specimen-specific multiscale data for the tibiofemoral joint may assist development and validation of specimen-specific computational models that may be useful for more thorough analyses of the biomechanical behavior of the joint. This study describes an aggregation of procedures for acquisition of multiscale anatomical and biomechanical data for the tibiofemoral joint. Magnetic resonance imaging was used to acquire anatomical morphology at the joint scale. A robotic testing system was used to quantify joint level biomechanical response under various loading scenarios. Tissue level material properties were obtained from the same specimen for the femoral and tibial articular cartilage, medial and lateral menisci, anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments, and medial and lateral collateral ligaments. Histology data were also obtained for all tissue types to measure specimen-specific cell scale information, e.g., cellular distribution. This study is the first of its kind to establish a comprehensive multiscale data set for a musculoskeletal joint and the presented data collection approach can be used as a general template to guide acquisition of specimen-specific comprehensive multiscale data for musculoskeletal joints.
Highlights
Biomechanics of the knee is dependent on the anatomy and mechanical properties of its numerous tissue structures as well as the interactions between them
It is anticipated that aggregation of these can be utilized for relational characterization of joint and tissue anatomy and mechanics in the future
The multiscale data set acquired from one knee joint was summarized to illustrate the breadth of specimen-specific information
Summary
Biomechanics of the knee is dependent on the anatomy and mechanical properties of its numerous tissue structures as well as the interactions between them. Past experimentation on knee biomechanics can be classified as: (1) those exploring the functional response of the joint and (2) those aiming to identify the anatomical and mechanical properties of the joint or its underlying tissues. Many studies have characterized individual tissue mechanics [10,11,12], but not necessarily elaborate on the role of variations in tissue properties on overall joint response. While the plethora of data separately available in literature, for joint response and for tissue response, can be aggregated, due to large variations in reported population data (dimensions, geometry, properties, etc.) [1,10], it is challenging to use this information to infer biomechanical relationships between different spatial scales and even within the same scale, among different tissue structures
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