Abstract
Mechanotransduction is an important process that influences bone remodeling and maintains viability of bone cells. To understand the effect of the vibrational mechanical stimulation on biomechanic responses of bone cells, a viscoelastic osteoblast finite element (FE) model was developed. Firstly, the mode shapes and natural frequencies of a spreading osteoblast were assessed using the FE modal analysis. The osteoblast FE model predicted the natural frequencies of osteoblasts (within the range about 19.99-34.48 Hz). Then, the effect of acceleration on the vibrational responses of in-vitro cultured osteoblasts was investigated. Three different accelerations of base excitation were selected (0.15g, 0.3g and 0.5g, where g = 9.8 m/s2) and the vibrational responses (displacement, strain and stress) of osteoblasts were simulated. It was found that values of displacement, strain and stress increase with the increase of base excitation acceleration. In addition, the response values in Z-direction are much higher than those in the other directions (X, Y-direction) for the same base excitation acceleration. These findings will provide useful information to understand how vibrational mechanical stimulus influences bone cells and provide guidance for in vitro cell culture and experimental research and ultimately clinical treatment using the external vibrating loading.
Highlights
Mechanical stimuli always act on living cells of the human in whole life [1]
The range of the natural frequency was reported between 9.95-211.05 Hz for a spreading bone cell [26]
It can be seen that the varying trend and natural frequency values of the current study are in accordance with those of the previous study [26, 27]
Summary
Mechanical stimuli always act on living cells of the human in whole life [1]. It is widely known that bone is a dynamic tissue, because the mechanical stimulus can control the bone resortion and/or apposition activities the bone remodelling cells and modify bone mass, shape and/or strength [2,3,4,5]. While cells are complex systems, to investigate biological responses of cells under external mechanical stimuli, cells can be modelled as some simple models, e.g. linear elastic models [8, 10], viscoelastic models [11, 12], power-law structural damping model [13, 14], biphasic models [15, 16] and the tensegrity model [17, 18]. Finite element (FE) analysis is a very powerful and efficient research tool to simulate the responses of cells under the external dynamic mechanical stimuli [8, 19,20,21]. To simulate the cellular mechanics behaviours like large deformation, the 3D cell-specific FE model was developed based on confocal microscopy [24]. To investigate viscoelastic property of bone cells under fluid flow, a new method was used combining fluid-structure interaction FE model and quasi-3D microscopy [12]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
