Much has been said and written in the last months about the knee of the most famous tennis player in my country, Rafa Nadal. Thus, I would like to write today about recent advances in knee injuries diagnosis and knee replacement.
ConforMIS personalized knee replacement
ConforMIS is making knee replacement surgery more personal, creating custom knee implants that exactly match the patient's anatomy. The company uses a technology known as rapid prototyping plus additive manufacturing, which converts a three-dimensional computer design into a physical object. A similar tool that allows personalized implant design and creation is the Materialise Mimics Innovation Suite. ConforMIS believes that such implants can help perform the knee replacement surgery more quickly, more accurately and with less traumatic effects for the patient.
The knee replacement surgery repairs damage and relieve pain in patients with severe osteoarthritis or knee injuries. The total knee replacement involves the extraction of dead cartilage and bone from the surface of the knee joint, the hip bone, the shin bone and the patella, and then replace it with an artificial joint made of a combination of metal and plastic. A partial knee replacement can also be carried out in only one part of the joint.
Typically, the surgeon chooses an artificial joint among several options of different sizes. ConforMIS, however, creates a custom implant based on data provided by images of the knee joint of the patient, with a technology that the company callas iFit. ConforMIS transformed medical images coming from a CT or MRI scanner in a three-dimensional computer model with the aid of a computer design program (CAD), and then used the 3D model as a template to manufacture the implant.
Use infrared to determine knee injury
Applied measurement sensors based on infrared may be used to diagnose patients with injuries in the ligaments of the knee, said Ricardo Aguilar, Biomedical Engineering student at ITESM Campus Chihuahua.
The anterior cruciate ligament injury of the knee is a recurrent injury in athletes, as well as in automobile accidents, when the knee is impacted. The biggest problem however is not the difficulty of treating the injury, but the diagnosis of the degree of damage suffered by the patient, he said.
Currently the only way to diagnose the degree of injury is to perform surgery in the patient to detect low visual appreciation tissue conditions. The biomedical research center ITESM Campus Chihuahua started since April this year an investigation coordinated by the orthopedics at Hospital Christus Muguerza del Parque, to design a measurement system which allows detecting, through an analysis of "pivochips", the gravity of the existing knee injury.
In a study based on "pivochips", sensors of an electromyograph with accelerometers owned by the Biomedical Research Laboratory are connected to the patient's injured knee, which are capable of measuring muscle behavior and the affected area during some movements by using infrared sensors, so the degree of injury can be determined without the need to perform surgery.
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