Assessment of intraoperative forces

J. Bätz, G. Campbell, A. Krull, N. Bishop, M.M. Morlock

 

Endoprosthetic components are generally impacted into the skeleton. The mechanics of impaction is not well understood, but could lead to damage like intraoperative periprosthetic fracture and early failure. Currently there are no guidelines for surgeons about ideally applied implantation forces.

Various instruments have been instrumented with dynamic load cells and accelerometers to determine dynamic processes intraoperatively. They are used to study applied forces by surgeons to assemble either the bone-stem-interface or the head-stem-interface. Forces are determined in experiments incorporating substitute models in the lab, validated in human specimen experiments and used as input data for numeric modelling. The influence of different implantation parameters is studied with this method.