Mechanical and microarchitectural analyses of cancellous bone through experiment and computer simulation

The relationship between microarchitecture to the failure mechanism and mechanical properties can be assessed through experimental and computational methods. In this study, both methods were utilised using bovine cadavers. Twenty four samples of cancellous bone were extracted from fresh bovine and the samples were cleaned from excessive marrow. Uniaxial compression testing was performed with displacement control. After mechanical testing, each specimen was ashed in a furnace. Four of the samples were exemplarily scanned using micro-computed tomography (μCT) and three dimensional models of the cancellous bones were reconstructed for finite element simulation. The mechanical properties and the failure modes obtained from numerical simulations were then compared to the experiments. Correlations between microarchitectural parameters to the mechanical properties and failure modes were then made. The Young’s modulus correlates well with the bone volume fraction with R2 = 0.615 and P value 0.013. Three different types of failure modes of cancellous bone were observed: oblique fracture (21.7%), perpendicular global fracture (47.8%), and scattered localised fracture (30.4%). However, no correlations were found between the failure modes to the morphological parameters. The percentage of error between computer predictions and the actual experimental test was from 6 to 12%. These mechanical properties and information on failure modes can be used for the development of synthetic cancellous bone.