Bone Remodelling Around Uncemented Acetabular Prostheses

Despite the generally inferior clinical performance of acetabular prostheses as compared to the femoral implants, the causes of acetabular component loosening and the extent to which mechanical factors play a role in the failure mechanism are not clearly understood yet. The study was aimed at investigating the load transfer and bone remodelling around the uncemented acetabular prosthesis.The 3-D FE model of a natural right hemi-pelvis was developed using CT-scan data. The same bone was implanted with two uncemented hemispherical acetabular components, one metallic (CoCrMo alloy) and the other ceramic (Biolox delta), with 54 mm outer diameter and 48 mm bearing diameter. The FE models of the implanted pelvis (containing ∼116000 quadratic tetrahedrals) were generated using a submodelling approach, which were based on an overall full model of implanted pelvis (containing ∼217600 quadratic tetrahedrals) acted upon by hip joint force and twenty one muscle forces. The apparent density (ρ in g cm−3) of each cance...