team photo

Figure 1
project photo


Team 38

Team Members

Faculty Advisor

Brian Santivanez
Andrew Shortridge

Thanh Nguyen

Sponsor

Windham Dental

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As the number of prosthetic orthopedic procedures increases every year, it is important to assess the complications that may result following these surgeries. The orthopedic procedure of interest in this project was a total hip arthroplasty(THA), also known as a hip replacement. Following a  hip replacement, there is a classification of fractures known as the Vancouver classification of postoperative periprosthetic fractures. Under this classification there are five different types of fractures that can occur postoperatively. The Type B1 fracture was the one we chose to analyze due to its location being below the femoral stem implant. We modeled a femoral stem in SolidWorks to be inserted into a femur derived from a CT scan. Following the Vancouver classification, the Type B1 femoral fracture was simulated in ANSYS finite element software. The simulation results in the region of bone just below the implant were analyzed to see where fracture is likely. Thus, we were able to return a distribution of stresses for a given patient’s loading scenario. The stresses in this particular region were then surveyed using statistics to assess significance. Corresponding p-values after each simulation allowed us to indicate with what confidence we predicted the induced failure in the region.