Abstract
Degenerative bone disease is a condition that often affects the articulating joints in the body by compromising the normal range of movement in those areas. As the condition progresses, the patient experiences a more painful and reduced level of mobility, often requiring joint replacement therapy. As the use of orthopaedic implants has become commonplace, the need to adequately understand and characterize the body’s biomechanical response to such implants is necessary to assist patients in achieving a more complete recovery, and more importantly, to optimize the design of biocompatible implants. The total knee replacement (TKR), a modular assembly comprising of femoral, tibial, and patellar components, has demonstrated great benefit to patients in terms of pain management and restoration of mobility. However, with reported disadvantages including stem loosening and bone fracture [1], correlating three dimensional stress concentrations to bone resorption may be an effective predictor of potential bone fracture site in TKR patients. The relationship between stress adaptive theories, stress concentrations predicted by computational modeling, and bone resorption has previously not been studied in great detail. This paper develops a continuum relationship that relates stress adaptive bone remodeling in response to stress concentrations, and presents a basic finite element model to quantify stress concentrations to help verify the proposed relationship. Results could eventually be used recursively to optimize TKR implant design and performance.
