Static structural analysis of humerus bone to find out the load at which fracture occurs and predict suitable alternative materials for bone implants

Trends in the Characterization of the Proximal Humerus in Biomechanical Studies: A Review

“…Perren stated that bone anisotropy is not significant in ORIF, so it can be ignored when treating bone as a material [55]. The literature corroborates this, showing that using isotropic material properties for the bone is sufficient for analysis under simple loads [3,5,[23][24][25][26]28,30,54,56].…”

“…Therefore, the simpliest way to evaluate the effectiviness of the model simplification technique is through the words of the researcher, comparing their model with the literature or a physical validation test. Thus, it can be seen that the use of a solid proximal humerus model, without distinguishing bone tissues, as used by Chaundry et al [25], shows minimal levels of bone stress compared to the literature. This is as expected, as it is the farthest model from an actual bone, and the model was not validated with a physical test.…”

“…It consists of a complete solid model of the humerus, without distinguishing between cancellous and cortical bone ( Figure 4A). An example of this approach is the 3D models used in the research by Chaudhry et al and Shaikh et al [25,26]. The next method, which is less common, consists of two main parts: the diaphysis and the humeral head, where the humeral head is completely solid considering that it is almost all cancellous bone, and the diaphysis is empty due to the medullary cavity ( Figure 4B).…”

“…Nevertheless, discrepancies exist between studies due to the lack of standards for the characterization of the bone model, including in proximal humerus studies. Each researcher uses different bone material properties and natures; for instance, there are studies were the orthotropic nature is preferred for the bone [20,21], while others use the isotropic nature [3,5,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28], even when anisotropy is the actual nature of bone tissues. The research papers also differ in their modeling technique.…”

“…The research papers also differ in their modeling technique. Some researchers consider the bone as a solid and "homogeneous" model, without distinguishing between the different bone tissue [25,26], while other studies use a threshold to separate cancellous and cortical bone in order to maintain real bone structure in their model [3,5,20,[29][30][31]. What is more, each researcher uses dissimilar meshing parameters for their FEA bone models-crucial parameters for the accuracy of outcomes, which vary from the type of element to the element's edge length.…”