Biomechanical Effects of Spinal Fusion to Adjacent Vertebral Segments

Visualization of Human Spine Biomechanics for Spinal Surgery

“…4). The pipeline involves an automatic segmentation process [1], followed by data pre-processing, and a multi-body-simulation [5,8]. Biomechanical researchers are currently incorporating patient-specific spinal motion data, captured with visible light techniques, into the simulation model.…”

“…Computer simulations of spinal mechanics can provide information that helps to answer medical research questions and might become an important asset in planning surgical interventions. Recent advances in multibody simulation allow for the modelling of patient-specific spinal structures, including the simulation of complex motion sequences [4][5][6]. Typically, parameters like stiffness and damping of the modelled bodies are taken from studies performed on real tissue [48,61] and additional aspects can be taken into account, such as image-based tissue degeneration scores [30,62].…”

“…Based on this information the biomechanical simulation is performed (4). In this work, we show how the results can be visualized (5). We target to facilitate inclusion of patient-specific motion data, which is currently being integrated into the pipeline.…”

Basics of Multibody Systems: Presented by Practical Simulation Examples of Spine Models

“…Most movements of the intervertebral discs do not consist of purely translational movements but also of intervertebral rotations. If the disc is deflected from its initial position, a deflection-dependent reaction torque will be developed [24].…”

“…The model validation was performed by comparing the simulation results with FE results and in-vivo data as found in references [7,[27][28][29]. A detailed presentation of the validation is to be taken from reference [24]. Another difficulty lies in the selection of suitable input parameters from the literature.…”