It is very interesting in many fields like material science or medical imaging to evaluate the mechanical properties of a structure. Finite elements analysis is often used for this purpose. However, its application to complex porous media like trabecular bone is limited because of the huge amount of elements that are needed to accurately represent the structure. In this communication, we propose a new finite elements approach which takes in account the topology of the studied structure. For that we implement and improve a recent technique based on the 3D skeleton, which allows characterizing complex porous media. Each trabeculae of the internal structure can then be modelled as a rectilinear-beams-chain with the properties of the arch. This approach significantly reduces the finite elements mechanical simulation’s computing time while preserving the accuracy of the results, according to a reference model. We evaluated this technique on test vectors, then applied our method on trabecular bone samples in order to precisely quantify their elasticity. This new model gives better stiffness results on test vectors compared to existing beam-elements techniques. This trend is confirmed when the model is used for trabecular bone microarchitecture analysis.
[1]
Raoul Kopelman,et al.
Percolation and cluster distribution. I. Cluster multiple labeling technique and critical concentration algorithm
,
1976
.
[2]
Milan Sonka,et al.
A Fully Parallel 3D Thinning Algorithm and Its Applications
,
1996,
Comput. Vis. Image Underst..
[3]
G. Dhatt,et al.
Modélisation des structures par éléments finis
,
1990
.
[4]
Joseph Hoshen,et al.
Percolation and cluster distribution. III. Algorithms for the site-bond problem
,
1979
.
[5]
Laurent Pothuaud,et al.
A New Computational Efficient Approach for Trabecular Bone Analysis using Beam Models Generated with Skeletonized Graph Technique
,
2004,
Computer methods in biomechanics and biomedical engineering.