An Approach to Microscopic Cortical Bone Fracture Simulation: Enhancing Clinical Replication

Abstract

The acquisition of bone models to perform simulations is a complex and expensive process. The hierarchical structure of bones is very complex, so that studies are mainly focused on the larger scales of bones. The objective of this work is to perform a fracture simulation at the microscale level. For this purpose, the first part of the process focuses on segmenting a bone model and selecting an area of it to generate a representation of the microstructures that make up the bone tissue from a microscopic point of view. The second part is dedicated to carry out a fracture simulation in the microscopic bone model. The developed algorithm follows a statistical approach and solves the main problems of the traditional approach (FEM) to perform a bone fracture simulation. The method returns the path that a fracture follows and demonstrates how bone structures affect fracture growth. The parameters used are configurable and can be adapted for specific cases. In addition, users can reproduce as many clinical cases as desired within seconds without have to manually segment images obtained from a microscope. The data obtained may be exported to obtain synthetic images that could be used to generate datasets for machine learning tasks or other purposes.