Title: Assessment of stress distribution in ankle joint: simultaneous application of experimental and finite element methods

Authors: Ahmad Chitsazan; Gholamreza Rouhi; Mostafa Abbasi; Saeid Pezeshki; Seyed Amir Hossein Tavakoli

Addresses: Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, 424 Hafez Avenue, Tehran 15914, Iran ' Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, 424 Hafez Avenue, Tehran 15914, Iran ' Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, University of Denver, Denver, USA ' Faculty of Medical Sciences, Islamic Azad University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran ' Iranian Tissue Bank Research and Preparation Centre, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: The goal of this study was to determine stress distribution in ankle joint by correlating with the strain distribution and its trend around tibia adjacent to the joint. Using an in-house device, an ankle from a cadaver was kept stable and loaded in various positions: neutral, dorsiflexion, plantar flexion, inversion and eversion. A total of six strain gauges were mounted around the shaft of the tibia, near the tibiotalar joint. This arrangement allowed us to measure deformations in the shaft of tibia. Patient-specific ankle joint geometry was generated from computed tomography data. The finite element model (FEM) of the ankle was validated using the experimental data logged by the strain gauges, and used for obtaining stress on the joint surface. A strong correlation was observed between the FEM and experimentally measured strains in magnitude (R = 0.94, P = 0.008), consequently stress distribution over the joint surface was obtained.

Keywords: ankle joints; strain gauge; stress distribution; finite element analysis; FEA; contact stress; ankle joint stress; ankle joint geometry; computed tomography; modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJECB.2015.067681

International Journal of Experimental and Computational Biomechanics, 2015 Vol.3 No.1, pp.45 - 61

Received: 22 Apr 2014
Accepted: 13 Jul 2014
Published online: 18 Mar 2015 *