The Effect of Stem on The Knee Joint Prosthesis Flexion Considering Natural Gait Forces

Abstract

The knee as a vital organ in the human body skeleton is one of the largest joints. In recent years, there have been a variety of therapies offered to improve the efficiency and performance of an implanted prosthetic knee joint. Knee replacement is considered as one of the most common and effective treatments which is technically known as knee arthroplasty. Various factors could affect the mechanical behavior of knee arthroplasty, including the patients’ sex, physical, and bone characteristics as well as prosthesis type, structure, and geometry. The very recent advances in arthroplasty have enabled the orthopedists to achieve more desirable results by following the standards offered for prosthesis considering the anatomical geometry and material structure. Knee prosthetic implants with and without stem are the two prevalent types that orthopedists utilize for the joint replacement. In this case study, a real knee joint geometry is reconstructed using the CT images and MIMICS software. The knee arthroplasty model was then imported to the ABAQUS to perform FE analysis on the two aforementioned types of prosthesis. According to the results, the prosthesis with stem causes more stress on the joint components in the vicinity of the implantation region but will allow the knee joint to have a greater angular displacement with lower stress.