Elastic properties of 3D printed clavicles are closer to cadaveric bones of elderly donors than commercial synthetic bones

Synthetic bone models have increasing utility in orthopaedic research due to their low cost and low variability and have been shown to be biomechanically equivalent to human bones in a variety of ways. The rise in additive manufacturing (AM) for orthopaedic applications presents an opportunity to construct synthetic whole-bone models for biomechanical testing applications, but there is a lack of research comparing these AM models to cadaveric or commercially available bone surrogates. This study compares the mechanical properties of 3D printed clavicle models to commercially available (4th generation Sawbones) and human cadaveric clavicles via nondestructive cyclic 4-point bending, axial compression, and torsion, and a final axial compression test to failure. Commercially available synthetic clavicles had 57.8–203% higher superior-inferior bending rigidity (p < 0.0001), 80.9–198% higher axial stiffness (p < 0.001), and 314–557% higher torsional rigidity (p < 0.05) on average than AM and cadaveric clavicles. Cadaveric and AM clavicles printed from a BoneMatrix/VeroWhite composite material had similar failure mechanisms under axial compression while AM VeroWhite clavicles experienced catastrophic failure, but these groups did not have significantly different ultimate failure loads. Together, these results demonstrate that current commercially available synthetic clavicles may be too rigid to emulate the mechanical properties of elderly cadaveric clavicles, and that AM bone models can closely mimic these cadaveric bones in a variety of biomechanical loading schemes. These results show promising applications for future work using 3D printed bone surrogates for biomechanical analysis of orthopaedic implants and other surgical repair techniques.