Northeastern University



DESIGN OF ADVANCED WRIST REPLACEMENT IMPLANTUNIVERSITY OF BRIDGEPORTBRIDGEPORT, CTEDWIN DIVAKARAN MARIA SELVARAJDEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERINGABSTRACTThe purpose of the paper is to decrease the difficulties of patient and improve the efficiency in wrist bone replacement by introducing a new replacement component design. Significant number of people have arthritis in their wrist. Wrist arthritis can be cured by surgical process of replacing the wrist bone called wrist arthroplasty. The current surgical process involves in removing a portion of wrist and radius bones, replaced by implanting a metal component with a plastic spacer. The implant is a common structure but the size of the bone varies with people which leads to problems like pain due to expansion of muscles, loosening because it is not replacing the exact place, and lot of physiotherapy requirement due to introduction of new structure into the body. The project involves in making the implant component exactly to the size of the patient’s bone to be removed. This can be achieved by following techniques. Fusing computed tomography scan and MRI scan of the patient, a 3D virtual structure of wrist and radius bones can be created. From the 3D structure the bone area to be removed is taken and converted into a 3D CAD (Computer Aided Design) model. The holes and projections for placing component are included in the model. The CAD model is feed in laser sintering system which uses direct CAD to make the metal component with high accuracy. By replacing this new component in the wrist after removing the bone the body will not have any difficulties to accommodate the new component since it is made to perfect structure of the bone which is been removed. By this method we can achieve up to 50% requirement of physiotherapy, increase in lifetime of implant more than 20 years and can reduce the failures to a significant rate. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download