Bone Cell and Tissue Mechanics
July 19, 2010 — July 23, 2010
Coordinator:
- Stephen C. Cowin (City University of New York, USA)
Bone mechanics is considered here to include the mechanical behavior of whole bones as structural elements, the mechanical behavior of bone tissue as a material, the response of bone cells to mechanical and electrokinetic stimuli and the physiological significance of the mechanical behavior. Specialists in anatomy, orthopaedics, dentistry, biochemistry and molecular and cellular biology, as well as biomechanics, are involved in the bone cell and tissue mechanics. This topic has only formalized into a distinct discipline in the last thirty years. During this period the important mechanical properties of bone have been determined, but the salient mechanical properties of bone cells are only now being studied.
Bone remodeling is the primary research area in bone mechanics. We use the term “remodeling” to describe the renewal and redevelopment of bone tissue as it adapts to altered load bearing. That is to say, in the course of time bone changes its shape, its apparent density, and its stiffness to adapt to the environmental load it experiences. Bone is sometimes viewed as an optimum composite and the skeletal system is an optimal structure. The cellular mechanisms that constitute the mechanosensory system in bone tissue and drive the adaptive remodeling are unknown at the present time, but there are several promising candidates for the mechanosensory system.
The subject of bone mechanics is basic to the understanding of musculoskeletal disease, the principles underlying orthopaedic and dental surgery and the design of orthopaedic implanted prostheses such as artificial hips, knees, finger joints, etc. The engineering design of these orthopaedic appliances is about fifty years old and is still in a state of evolution, particularly in the area of orthobiologics. It is a major manufacturing industry.
The goal of this course will be to review the entire area of bone cell and tissue mechanics, with an emphasis on bone remodeling. Besides being informative, it is hoped that the course will function as a forum for the exchange of data, philosophy, and ideas across disciplinary divides and so provide further stimulus for a comprehensive approach to the problems of bone mechanics. We expect an audience as diverse in background as the lecturers, that is to say spanning the across the professional spectrum from material scientists to biologists, to orthopaedic and dental surgeons, to veterinarians and to structural and biomedical engineers.
Kywords: Biomechanics, Continuum Mechanics, Finite Element Methods, Soil Mechanics, Rheology