Study on the characteristics of biology force line of proximal femur based on structural topology optimization

Abstract

Internal fixator is usually adopted in the treatment of bone fractures. In order to achieve anatomical reduction and effective fixation of fractures, the placement of internal fixators should comply with the biology force line of the bone and adapt to the specific anatomical morphological characteristics of the cortical bone. In order to investigate the distribution characteristics and formation regularity of biology force line and cortical thickness of human bone, three-dimensional model of proximal femur is established by using three-dimensional reconstruction technique in this paper. The normal physiological stress distribution of proximal femur is obtained by finite element analysis under three kinds of behavior conditions: one-legged stance, abduction and adduction. The structural topology optimization method is applied to simulate the cortex of the proximal femur under the combined action of three kinds of behavior conditions, and the anatomic morphological characteristics of the proximal femur are compared. The distribution trend of biology force line of proximal femur and the characteristics of cortex are analyzed. The results show that the biology force lines of bone structure and the morphological characteristics of cortex depend on the load of human activities. The distribution trend of biology force line is related to the direction of trabecular bone and the ridge trend and firmness of cortex when bone is loaded physiologically. The proposed analytical method provides a solution to determine the biology force line of bone and the distribution characteristics of cortex. The conclusions obtained may guide the reasonable placement of internal fixator components of fracture.