Biomechanics of bone transport: in vivo, ex vivo and numerical characterization

Abstract

The work carried out in this Thesis was motivated by the need of providing experimental data about distraction osteogenesis to improve and validate in silico models of the process. Computational models of distraction osteogenesis allow understanding the mechanobiology and improving the clinical applications of the process. In the last years, numerical models were proposed based on different hypothesis [8, 12, 14–16]. Although experimental studies which evaluated mechanical, biological or both aspects of distraction osteogenesis may be found in literature [1–7, 9–11], the differences existing in the conditions of the experiments carried out make difficult to compare among these studies and to make conclusions. Therefore, more experimental data are demanded to validate computational models and to improve the clinical applications.