Design of a novel anterior cruciate ligament prosthesis

Injuries to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) are extremely common (approximately 100,000 every year in the US) and result in greatly reduced mobility; although several surgical procedures have been devised to address this condition, they are far from being completely satisfactory. The golden standard is currently represented by tendon autografts which, however, result in considerable donor site morbidity. An ideal solution would be to use effective, off-the-shelf permanent prostheses: however, all such devices proposed to date have proved highly disappointing, because of poor long term stability and biocompatibility, and unphysiological mechanical behavior. To address both concerns a novel prosthetic device has been developed, employing crimped NiTi superelastic wire bundles. To achieve near-physiological mechanical behavior, the fiber geometry resembles (on a much larger scale) that of the collagen fibrils that naturally make up the ligament, using as a starting point the Comninou-Yannas crimped-fiber model.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Talei Franzesi, Giovanni

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Myron Spector and Ioannis V. Yannas.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36693

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/36693