Percussion Response System for Titanium Femur Implants

Percussion testing can be used to assess the stability of an orthopedic implant, but this has only been demonstrated with dental implants in the past. Quantitatively, little is understood about the correlation between bone physiology and stability of a titanium femur implant, which is our implant of interest. Research has shown that a percussion instrument  (Periometer®, Perimetrics LLC, Newport Beach, CA, USA) can be used to assess a dental implant’s stability through analyzing its mechanical behavior during percussion testing. The same goal can be achieved if a larger percussion instrument used to analyze titanium femur implants existed. The purpose of the present research was to construct a custom percussion instrument that can assess the stability of various titanium femur implants quantitatively. An electronic signal conditioning system was built and then connected to National Instruments® myDAQ in order to acquire the percussion response of the titanium femur using custom LabVIEW® software. Using a solenoid, this system can test the stability of titanium femurs in real time and could potentially be the standard of testing titanium femurs implants during manufacturing as well as surgical placement. The hypothesis of this study is that the newly constructed percussion device will provide accurate readings of the stability of the titanium femur. Percussion response graphs support this hypothesis and suggest that they can be further analyzed in order to gather information regarding bone physiology and osseointegration.