MODELING BONE HEALING BY BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHOD

Fracture healing is initiated and tightly regulated mainly by growth factors and by mechanical environment around the callus site. Biomechanics of fracture healing have been previously studied. Most computational models are based on finite elements and some of them study the level of strain or stress in the different tissues. These strain/stress fields are the main mechanical stimuli affecting cell differentiation and ossification pathway. In this work we incorporated that hypothesis into an axisymmetric boundary element framework (BEM). The key idea is to establish BEM as an attractive alternative to the more familiar finite difference and finiteelement methods for-this kind of problems. The results were in good agreement with those reported in previous works. As a rough simplification of actual trends in this field, a lineal elastic analysis was used to simulate the stimulatory and inhibitory effects of strains on the tissue differentiation process, following the work done by Claes and Heigele(10). Subsequently, the pore pressure was included into a bifasic stationary-poroelastic callus model, as a part of the stimuli function. These analyses allowed to extend the observations made by Claes and Heigele(10) and a new correlation is proposed. In addition to earlier quantitative theories, recent poroelastic Models will be able to compare the tissue properties evolution, such as the elastic moduli (E) and Poisson ratio (v), as a function of new stimuli values.