PURPOSE To investigate (1) effects of endplate removal and bone mineral density (BMD) on biomechanical properties of lumbar vertebrae (2) whether the distributions of mechanical strength and stiffness of endplate are affected by BMD. METHODS A total of thirty-one lumbar spines (L1-L5) collected from fresh cadavers were used in this study. Bone density was measured using lateral DEXA scans and...

his article describes our ongoing efforts in computer-aided surgery. We are developing and testing a biomechanical guidance system that will interact with the surgeon and report the biomechanical state of the joint during hip surgery. The system uses information from the imagery of a computer-assisted navigation system and displays the contact pressure distribution in the hip joint as the joint...

BIOSWIM (Body Interface System based on Wearable Integration Monitoring) is a joint multidisciplinary effort involving a number of Portuguese R&D teams. It seeks a pervasive monitoring solution for physiological and biomechanical signals from a swimmer under normal training conditions, both in and out of the water. A wearable inertial monitoring unit (WIMU) was developed in order to serve as th...

Fractures of the proximal femur are one of the principal causes of mortality among elderly persons. Traditional methods for the determination of femoral fracture risk use methods for measuring bone mineral density. However, BMD alone is not sufficient to predict bone failure load for an individual patient and additional parameters have to be determined for this purpose. In this work an approach...

Biomechanical modelling and simulation techniques offer some hope for unravelling the complex inter-relationships of structure and function perhaps even for extinct organisms, but have their limitations owing to this complexity and the many unknown parameters for fossil taxa. Validation and sensitivity analysis are two indispensable approaches for quantifying the accuracy and reliability of suc...

Biomechanical modelling is a powerful tool for quantifying the evolution of functional performance in extinct animals to understand key anatomical innovations and selective pressures driving major evolutionary radiations. However, fossil record composed predominantly hard parts, forcing palaeontologists reconstruct soft tissue properties such models. Rarely are these reconstruction approaches v...