Real-Time Wireless Platform for In Vivo Monitoring of Bone Regeneration

For the monitoring of bone regeneration processes, the instrumentation of the fixation is an increasingly common technique to indirectly measure the evolution of bone formation instead of ex vivo measurements or traditional in vivo techniques, such as X-ray or visual review. A versatile instrumented...

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Published inSensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 20; no. 16; p. 4591
Main Authors Blázquez-Carmona, Pablo, Sanchez-Raya, Manuel, Mora-Macías, Juan, Gómez-Galán, Juan Antonio, Domínguez, Jaime, Reina-Romo, Esther
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland MDPI 15.08.2020
MDPI AG
Subjects
Animals
Bone Regeneration
Bony Callus
calibration
callus stiffness
external fixator
External Fixators
load sensor
Metatarsal Bones
Monitoring, Physiologic
Radiography
Sheep
wireless acquisition system
bone regeneration
callus stiffness
load sensor
calibration
wireless acquisition system
external fixator
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Summary:For the monitoring of bone regeneration processes, the instrumentation of the fixation is an increasingly common technique to indirectly measure the evolution of bone formation instead of ex vivo measurements or traditional in vivo techniques, such as X-ray or visual review. A versatile instrumented external fixator capable of adapting to multiple bone regeneration processes was designed, as well as a wireless acquisition system for the data collection. The design and implementation of the overall architecture of such a system is described in this work, including the hardware, firmware, and mechanical components. The measurements are conditioned and subsequently sent to a PC via wireless communication to be in vivo displayed and analyzed using a developed real-time monitoring application. Moreover, a model for the in vivo estimation of the bone callus stiffness from collected data was defined. This model was validated in vitro using elastic springs, reporting promising results with respect to previous equipment, with average errors and uncertainties below 6.7% and 14.04%. The devices were also validated in vivo performing a bone lengthening treatment on a sheep metatarsus. The resulting system allowed the in vivo mechanical characterization of the bone callus during experimentation, providing a low-cost, simple, and highly reliable solution.
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These authors contributed equally to this work.
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s20164591