Bioimpedance and Bone Fracture Detection: A State of the Art

Abstract

Bioimpedance measurements are used increasingly in health applications because bioelectric parameters have been associated with anatomical and physiological properties, thus enabling to distinguish medical conditions. For bone fracture diagnostics, nevertheless, there is no established non-invasive method. Ex vivo studies and In vivo bioimpedance procedures, both invasive and non-invasive, on mammalians long bones are associated with promising results. In this work, out of a total of 568 papers, we reviewd 59 articles that mention long bone integrity by electric properties, be it Bioimpedance Analysis, Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy or Electrical Impedance Tomography. The papers are described in three sections, “Ex vivo measurements”, “In vivo invasive measurements” and “In vivo non-invasive measurements”. This review allows to establish the basics to planning the development of new technology to detect bone fracture via bioimpedance measurements.

Bone Fracture Detection by Electrical Bioimpedance: First Non-Invasive Measurements in Ex-Vivo Mammalian Femur

“…At present, there is no bioimpedance or EIS analysis with non-invasive surface electrodes (invasive surgical pins in bone tissue and limb had been used) on living beings to correlate bioimpedance values with bone limbs integrity [12], though attempts of application of Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) [14] to generate a diagnostic image has been made, but these had not reached a quality to make a diagnosis. So this work could represent the first approach, from a simplified model such as phantoms built, to take surface measurements; obtaining coherent data with respect to the basic concepts of the EIS (Cole Cole diagram) and compatible with the physiopathological reality of bone fracture (increase in conductivity from the absence of a tissue of greater resistivity as it is the bone that is replaced by blood and extravascular/high conductive fluids) [7].…”

“…As far as we know, at present there aren't published papers concerning superficial (non-invasive) measurements of bone tissue with the aim of identify a fracture in these structures both on humans or animals [12]. In these experiments, measurements of EIS at constant current (1mA) were made on two phantoms of ex-vivo bones excised from two cows coming from the same farm and having the similar age and weight: the one whole and the other billed.…”