Ultra-long-term knee wear testing: an in-silico perspective

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Description/Abstract

Wear is one of the many factors which concern total knee replacement (TKR) designers. With younger patients & increasing life expectancy, new TKR designs face a longer service life[1]. This has implications for conventional wear testing, typical in-vitro tests of 10 million cycles (MCycles) may represent only a fraction of this extended lifespan. Ultra-long term wear tests may reveal the extent to which TKR mechanics adapt over time; e.g. kinematics, contact area (CA), contact pressure (CP) and cross-shear (CS). It is unclear to what extent this long-term adaptation would be dependent on the test design (e.g. control method or input waveforms), as well as implant geometry. A 50MCycle test would take >1year to run in-vitro; hence in-silico methods offer a valuable complementary ‘screening tool’, to determine whether such ultra-long-term tests would be justified