Abstract
The finite element method has been increasingly adopted to study the biomechanical behavior of biologic structures. Once the finite element mesh has been generated from CT data set, the assignment of bone tissue’s material properties to each element is a fundamental step in the generation of individualized or subject-specific finite element models. The aim of this work is to simulate the inhomogeneous and anisotropic material properties of femur using the finite element method. A program is developed to read a CT data set as well as the finite element mesh generated from it, and to assign to each element of the mesh the material properties derived from the bone tissue density at the element location. Moreover, for cancellous bone in femoral neck and cortical bone in femoral stem, the principal orientations of transverse isotropy were defined based on the tra-becular structures and the haversian system respectively.
Highlights
The determination of the mechanical stresses in human bones is of great importance in both research and clinical practice
Since the stresses in bones cannot be measured non-invasively in vivo, an effective way to estimate them is through the finite element (FE) analysis which is widely used in academic research and clinical applications, such as the theory of bone remodeling [1], the design of prosthesis [2] and the evaluation of facture risk [3]
It is well known that CT images can provide fairly accurate quantitative information on bone geometry based on high contrast between the bone tissue and the soft tissue around [4,5]
Summary
The determination of the mechanical stresses in human bones is of great importance in both research and clinical practice. Good empirical relationships have been established experimentally between density and mechanical properties of bone tissues [7,8]. If a generic bone model was constructed, the mechanical properties of the different bone tissues were usually derived from average values reported in published experimental studies [9]. It is important to find an effective method to properly map the material properties derived from CT data into finite element models. Many approaches were proposed in literature to perform this task [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19] These algorithms only simulated the inhomogeneity of bone, and the isotropic material property assignment was adopted without considering the orientation of material. Biomedical Science and Engineering 2 (2009) 419-424 properties of femur with finite element method
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