Ideally, she says, surgeons would re-operate early on a patient with a nonunion. ![]() "And when a bone isn't healing properly, patients can be in pain for weeks or months." "Musculoskeletal injuries are very, very painful," says Dailey. This failure to heal is called a nonunion, and it can be utterly debilitating. Patients typically come in for X-rays at regular intervals, and as long as the images reveal there's increasingly more callus in the region, all is well.īut some people don't heal normally. Callus starts out as a spongy material that over time hardens into bone that is just as strong - or stronger - than it was before the break. As the weeks go by, more and more new bone called callus forms along the fracture line. Most people who break their tibia, or shin bone, proceed along a normal healing timeline. "When we put it all together, we were able to answer the question, 'Can the virtual mechanical test predict how long it will take the patient to heal?' We found that it could."ĭailey, who is also affiliated with Lehigh's Institute for Functional Materials and Devices (I-FMD), is the lead author of "Virtual Mechanical Testing Based On Low-Dose Computed Tomography Scans for Tibial Fracture." The paper appeared in the July 3 issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. Rossin School of Engineering and Applied Science. "What was exciting about our project was that all the mechanical analysis was done blinded to the clinical treatment of the patients, and the surgeon never saw any of our data," says Hannah Dailey, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at Lehigh University's P.C.
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