Biomechanical analysis of parietal-temporal implant: effects of implant materials, pore shapes and pore sizes / Wan Nur Fatini Syahirah W. Dagang

Cranial implants are designed to shield the brain before and after neurosurgery or trauma, thus their durability is crucial clinical value. The mechanical response of each implant cannot be practically described experimentally due to the rise in patient-specific implants. However, computational models such as finite element analysis (FEA) have a great chance of accurately forecasting the mechanical behaviour of implants designed specifically for a certain patient. FEA has been used extensively for the solid cranial implant, yet there has been relatively little research on FEA for porous implants. Thus, this study aimed to analyse the biomechanical behaviour of the solid implant and porous implant by varying implant pore shape (pentagonal and hexagonal), pore size (900 and 1200 μm), and materials (titanium, hydroxyapatite, and zinc-hydroxyapatite) through a finite element method. In the first phase of this research, the three–dimensional (3D) human skull model was developed from the 245 DICOM images with a thickness of 1 mm of a 15-year-old girl patient with a right parietal-temporal defect. The defective skull images underwent the segmentation technique using a threshold method with a Hounsfield unit of 226 HU to 3071 HU via the Mimics software. The excessive bone such as the neck area was removed using a split mask tool and the region of interest was exported as Standard Tessellation Language (STL) file. Next, the 3D skull model was loaded into 3 Matic software.