Biomechanical properties of artificial bones made by Sawbones: A review

• Published in: Medical engineering & physics Vol. 118; p. 104017
• Main Authors: Zdero, Radovan, Brzozowski, Pawel, Schemitsch, Emil H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01.08.2023
• Subjects: Artificial bone; Biomechanics; Composite bone; Properties; Sawbones; Biomechanics; Composite bone; Sawbones; Properties; Artificial bone
• ISSN: 1350-4533; 1873-4030
• DOI: 10.1016/j.medengphy.2023.104017

•The Sawbones company produces artificial bones for biomechanics research.•This article provides the first detailed survey of their biomechanical properties.•Characterization, validation, optimization, and application studies are included.•Data, trends, themes, and recommendations for future work are discussed. Biomedical engineers and physicists frequently use human or animal bone for orthopaedic biomechanics research because they are excellent approximations of living bone. But, there are drawbacks to biological bone, like degradation over time, ethical concerns, high financial costs, inter-specimen variability, storage requirements, supplier sourcing, transportation rules, etc. Consequently, since the late 1980s, the Sawbones® company has been one of the world's largest suppliers of artificial bones for biomechanical testing that counteract many disadvantages of biological bone. There have been many published reports using these bone analogs for research on joint replacement, bone fracture fixation, spine surgery, etc. But, there exists no prior review paper on these artificial bones that gives a comprehensive and in-depth look at the numerical data of interest to biomedical engineers and physicists. Thus, this paper critically reviews 25 years of English-language studies on the biomechanical properties of these artificial bones that (a) characterized unknown or unreported values, (b) validated them against biological bone, and/or (c) optimized different design parameters. This survey of data, advantages, disadvantages, and knowledge gaps will hopefully be useful to biomedical engineers and physicists in developing mechanical testing protocols and computational finite element models.