A model for bone remodeling: Cellular dynamics and mechanical loading

Abstract

Bone tissue is constantly active, being able to respond to any change in its microenvironment through bone remodeling. With this process, bone traduces any biomechanical stimulus into bone formation or resorption and is able to maintain skeleton's integrity. So, being a very important process in the organism, many researchers committed to its study, developing several mechanical and biological mathematical models of bone remodeling. However, there is a significant lack of models explicitly describing the effect of mechanical loading into bone cell dynamics. Therefore, this work aims to develop a new mechanobiological model of bone remodeling based on the purely biological model of Komarova. In the proposed model, remodeling occurs according to levels of the von Mises effective stress field that consequently affects differently the dynamics of osteoblasts and osteoclasts present in bone tissue. The von Mises effective stress field is obtained using the Natural Neighbour Radial Point Interpolation Method (NNRPIM). Results showed that remodeling follow the mechanical stimulus, occurring bone formation in high stressed zones and resorption in low stressed areas. In the end of the simulation, osteoblasts were able to form bone according to stress effective levels, validating the algorithm proposed.