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for The Micromechanics of Bone Strength and Osteoporosis

The Micromechanics of Bone Strength and Osteoporosis

Osteoporosis and age-related bone fragility is an important clinical problem worldwide.
Understanding the underlying biomechanical mechanisms of bone strength provides the
foundation for developing improved methods for clinical assessment of who is at risk of
a fracture, and for directing the development of drug treatments that will be most
effective in recovering lost bone strength. In this context, I will discuss our work on
understanding the failure mechanisms of whole bones and extending this to the clinic
for improved non-invasive assessment of bone strength. Our overall multiscale
approach uses a series of high-fidelity “specimen-specific” finite element modeling,
combined with biomechanical experiments on cadaver and animal bone, and has
provided much new insight into old questions regarding mechanisms of failure in whole
bones and at smaller scales. Our current 50-micron-resolution, materially and
kinematically non-linear finite element models of whole vertebrae and femora contain up
to 200 million finite elements, and represent some of the largest and most complex
structural analysis problems in the world. Clinical-resolution finite element models from
CT scans, following the same approach, can now provide patient-specific estimates of
whole-bone strength and are now FDA approved for clinical use. I’ll discuss some of the
technical challenges we have faced in this work, highlight some of our more intriguing
discoveries, and identify some of the remaining challenges faced by this field.

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