New approach to orthopaedic repair

The research has been inspired by the relationship between stress modulation and structures inside natural materials including bone, bird feathers and wood that have irregular architectures.

The broken edges in fractures of the femur cause stress to concentrate at the crack tip, increasing the chances that the fracture will lengthen. Conventional methods of repairing a fractured femur typically involve surgical procedures to attach a metal plate around the fracture with screws.

The study, led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign civil and environmental engineering Professor Shelly Zhang and graduate student Yingqi Jia in collaboration with Professor Ke Liu from Peking University, is said to introduce a new approach to orthopaedic repair that uses a fully controllable computational framework to produce a material that mimics bone.

The study findings are published in Nature Communications. 

“We started with materials database and used a virtual growth stimulator and machine learning algorithms to generate a virtual material, then learn the relationship between its structure and physical properties,” Zhang said in a statement. “What separates this work from past studies is that we took things a step further by developing a computational optimisation algorithm to maximise both the architecture and stress distribution we can control.”