A comparative analysis between different approaches for simulating the bone remodeling

Resumo

Bones can replace old and damaged tissue with healthy new tissue in a process called bone remodeling.
This process is biologically described by coordinated activity between bone formation (osteoblasts) and bone
resorption (osteoclasts) by following stages of activation, resorption, and formation. From a mechanical point of
view, there is formation (resorption) where there are high (low) levels of mechanical stimulus. The literature
presents several models for bone remodeling simulation, which can be classified as phenomenological, biological,
mechanobiological and chemomechanobiological, among others. Thus, this work aims, through numerical
simulations, to compare phenomenological and mechanobiological bone remodeling models. With the
phenomenological model, the objective is to obtain the density distribution that characterizes a human femur. In
turn, the mechanobiological model simulates the behavior of bone tissue by evaluating the biological feedback due
to different levels of external stimulus applied. It should be emphasized that in this second approach, simulation
time has real physical meaning. In the end, the bone tissue behavior was simulated using both approaches. The
mechanobiological model provided a distinct behavior for cortical, trabecular, and osteoporotic bones under
different load conditions. This was not visualized when we used the phenomenological approach. However, the
phenomenological model characterized the femoral density distribution that qualitatively represents a radiography.