A team of researchers from the universities of Huelva and Seville developed a procedure that analyzes the recovery of bone fractures to better understand the characteristics of the new formed tissue. The study, which compares for the first time several existing techniques, allows knowing the bone hardness and porosity needed for regeneration after surgery.

The system combines for the first time several existing techniques on the same sample, allowing researchers identifying the characteristics of the new tissue and knowing when it is regenerated.

The study has been applied to the process called osteogenic distraction, a bone regeneration procedure in which an element called a distractor is used to initially stabilizing a fractured bone  and progressively separate its segments. This mechanism exerts forces on the so-called fracture callus (newly formed bone tissue to connect the ends of the lesion) and is usually used in surgery to correct defects. The work tries to monitor the mechanical properties that the new bone acquires and when it reaches the necessary rigidity.

“From this process we have applied the engineering to know how that bone tissue grows, which depends on a mechanical stimulus and a series of loads that make the new bone tissue grow,” says Juan Mora, researcher at the University of Huelva and one of the authors of the article.

For this, the scientists compared different methods to assign the mechanical properties and thus have a predictive model of the rigidity that the new bone acquires. On the one hand, through Computerized Axial Tomography (CT), the observation of the gray level that appears in the image has been associated with various properties of the material. Another method is based on laboratory tests of calluses formed through nanometric techniques.

The study, published in the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, allowed combining methods, which implies a better prediction, taking into account mainly the first practices used, since the results related to rigidity were similar.

Bones regenerate

Osteogenesis is the process by which bones regenerate and not only after a fracture, but, throughout their existence, bone tissues deteriorate and this natural process facilitates the renewal of the same through the regeneration of new cells. The correct feeding or physical activity facilitate this constant renewal, it is what is known as bone remodeling.

The next step after this study is to make a computational model to predict the rigidity in osteogenic distraction and simulate the process according to the mechanical properties that have been calculated in this experiment.

At this time, scientists are also working in other applications such as tissue engineering to correct defects, involving placing a kind of mesh that gives rigidity and fills the defect and serves as scaffold for new cells to colonize that polymeric material.

 

Source: SINC