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Towards the development of a custom talus prosthesis produced by SLM: design rules and verification

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Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a promising technology for the personalized medicine industry, especially in the orthopedic field. It allows the production of prostheses that can fit complex anatomical sites and mimic bone morphology, featuring an external solid shell and an inner trabecular core. The new medical device regulation has recently outlined the need for safety assessment of these particular implants: to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no defined methodologies to assess the quality of a custom product since each device is intended for single-time use. The goal of the current work is to propose a well-structured pipeline for designing and verifying an AM custom prosthesis: the exemplified case is that for the ankle joint treatment (i.e. talus resurfacing), whose standard solutions are affected by significant failure rates. A comprehensive characterization of the unique features of AM orthopedic implants will be presented, integrating finite element analyses and experiments.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by MIUR 302 FISR-FISR 2019_03221 CECOMES.

The authors acknowledge Marco Cavicchio, who contributed to this work during his master’s thesis at Politecnico di Milano.

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Author notes

  1. These authors equally contributed to this work as the first author.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. LaBS (Laboratory of Biological Structures Mechanics) — Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering “G. Natta”, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Francesca Danielli, Francesca Berti, Martina Colombo, Tomaso Villa & Luigi La Barbera

  2. National Research Council - Institute of Condensed Matter Chemistry and Technology for Energy, Lecco, Italy

    Adelaide Nespoli

  3. IRCCS Istituto Ortopedico Galeazzi, Milan, Italy

    Tomaso Villa & Luigi La Barbera

  4. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Lorenza Petrini

Authors
  1. Francesca Danielli
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  2. Francesca Berti
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  3. Adelaide Nespoli
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  4. Martina Colombo
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  5. Tomaso Villa
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  6. Luigi La Barbera
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  7. Lorenza Petrini
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lorenza Petrini.

Additional information

Lorenza Petrini received her M.Sc. Degree in Structural Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering (2000) at University of Pavia. Since 2013 she is Associate Professor of Solid Mechanics at Politecnico di Milano (Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano). She has worked in the areas of mechanics of materials and devices in structural and biomedical fields. In the last years, she focused her research on: (i) mechanical characterization and numerical implementation of biomaterials behavior focusing on fatigue response; (ii) numerical and experimental studies for the design and evaluation of 3D printed biomedical devices. She is the author of more than 150 scientific works.

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Danielli, F., Berti, F., Nespoli, A. et al. Towards the development of a custom talus prosthesis produced by SLM: design rules and verification. J Mech Sci Technol 37, 1125–1130 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-022-2109-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-022-2109-z

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