OBJECTIVES Osteochondral injuries, if not treated adequately, often lead to severe osteoarthritis. Possible treatment options include refixation of the fragment or replacement therapies such as Pridie drilling, microfracture or osteochondral grafts, all of which have certain disadvantages. Only refixation of the fragment can produce a smooth and resilient joint surface. The aim of this study wa...

There is still a controversy in literature regarding the treatment of subcapital fractures of the hip with internal fixation. Different methods have been tested and studies such as in cadavers mainly prejudge the three cannulated screws application. We present a series of 20 patients in which percutaneous fixation with two parallel cannulated screws under specific technical conditions has led t...

BACKGROUND More than 200,000 children are injured at playgrounds in the United States each year. Our goal was to introduce a composite measure of playground safety and use this instrument to correlate the incidence of supracondylar humerus fractures with playground safety in an ecologic study design. METHODS We used a novel "overall-safety rating," defined as a composite of 3 previously valid...

INTRODUCTION There is a growing use of locking compression plates in fracture surgery. The current study was undertaken to investigate the wound complication rates of locking versus non-locking plates in distal fibular fractures. PATIENTS AND METHODS During a 6-year study period all consecutive, closed distal fibular fractures treated with either a locking or a non-locking plate were included...

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM An open fracture is defined as one in which the fracture fragments communicate with the environment through a break in the skin. The presence of an open fracture either isolated or as part of a multiple injury complex increases the risk of infection and soft tissue complications. In 1976, Gustilo and Anderson1 described a system to classify open fractures based on the s...

The recently developed Unconventional Fracture Model (UFM*) simulates complex hydraulic fracture network propagation in a formation with pre-existing closed natural fractures, and explicitly models hydraulic injection into a fracture network with multiple propagating branches [1]. The model predicts whether a hydraulic fracture front crosses or is arrested by a natural fracture it encounters, w...

BACKGROUND Among the millions of people suffering from a hip fracture each year, 20% may sustain a contralateral hip fracture within 5 years with an associated mortality risk increase reaching 64% in the 5 following years. In this context, we performed a biomechanical study to assess the performance of a hip fracture preventing implant. METHODS The implant consists of two interlocking peek ro...

BACKGROUND Prognosis of traumatic osteonecrosis of femoral head in children is poor for either conservative treatment or surgical intervention. Intravenous bisphosphonate is an expecting medication to reduce femoral head resorption and to prevent femoral head collapse after traumatic osteonecrosis. This mechanism will reduce development of osteoarthritis and disability in the future. OBJECTIV...

This paper describes the applications of the fractured continuum model to the different enhanced geothermal systems reservoir conditions. The capability of the fractured continuum model to generate fracture characteristics expected in enhanced geothermal systems reservoir environments are demonstrated for single and multiple sets of fractures. Fracture characteristics are defined by fracture st...