Recent Advances in Finite Element Applications in Artificial Lumbar Disc Replacement

As a new choice for the treatment of degenerative lumbar disease, artificial lumbar disc replacement has been widely used in clinical surgery. The finite element is a very effective method to predict and simulate the surgery effect. The purpose of this paper is to review the applications of finite element in artificial lumbar disc replacement, such as design of artificial lumbar disc prosthesis, risk and effect evaluation of artificial lumbar disc replacement, and assessment of operation methods. Lastly, we discuss the future development of finite element method applied in this field, including personalized design of the prosthesis, postoperative behavior guide, and artificial lumbar disc replacement combined with fusion surgery. In conclusion, as an invaluable complement to biomechanical experiments and clinical studies, the finite element method makes important contributions to our understanding of biomechanics of intervertebral disc, and plays an important role in the field of artificial lumbar disc replacement.

The Method Exploration for Measuring the Strain of the Intervertebral Disc

Many researches point out that intervertebral pressure and transformation are key parameters for evaluating intervertebral disc degeneration. Aiming at avoiding the damage caused by direct and indirect measuring methods, this research proposes a cylindroid hypothesis and measuring method, which can monitor the strain condition of the intervertebral disc in vivo and real-time without being damaged.

Antibacterial Properties of Ti-6Al-4V-xCu Alloys

Surgical implant-associated bacterial infection is becoming a serious clinical problem. A series of copper-bearing titanium alloy, Ti-6Al-4V-xCu （x = 1, 3, 5 wt%）, were fabricated in the present study in order to reduce the hazard of the bacterial infection problem by means of the strong antibacterial ability of Cu element. The metallography, X-ray diffraction, antibacterial ability, corrosion resistance and cytotoxicity of Ti-6Al-4V-xCu alloys were preliminarily studied with comparison to the commercial medical Ti-6Al-4V alloy. The Ti-6Al- 4V-xCu alloys showed obvious antibacterial abilities with good corrosion resistance and cytocompatibility, and the antibacterial role was enhanced with increasing Cu content, which has significant potential for clinical applications as surgical implant materials.

Morphological residual convolutional neural network(M-RCNN)for intelligent recognition of wear particles from artificial joints

Finding the correct category of wear particles is important to understand the tribological behavior.However,manual identification is tedious and time-consuming.We here propose an automatic morphological residual convolutional neural network(M-RCNN),exploiting the residual knowledge and morphological priors between various particle types.We also employ data augmentation to prevent performance deterioration caused by the extremely imbalanced problem of class distribution.Experimental results indicate that our morphological priors are distinguishable and beneficial to largely boosting overall performance.M-RCNN demonstrates a much higher accuracy(0.940)than the deep residual network(0.845)and support vector machine(0.821).This work provides an effective solution for automatically identifying wear particles and can be a powerful tool to further analyze the failure mechanisms of artificial joints.

Effect of Heat Treatment on Cu Distribution,Antibacterial Performance and Cytotoxicity of Ti-6Al-4V-5Cu Alloy

A copper-bearing Ti-6Al-4V-5Cu alloy was processed and subjected to different heat treatments to explore the relationship among microstructure, antibacterial performance, and cytocompatibility. Characterization of microstructure revealed that the solution treated alloy consisted of α phase, α＇ phase and β phase, while besides these phases, the aged alloy also contained the precipitations of intermetallic Ti2Cu compound. The solution treated alloy showed better antibacterial performance with increasing the solution temperature. The Cu ions released from Ti-6AI-4V-5Cu alloy could effectively inhibit the formation of bacterial biofilm on the surface of alloy, and do not induce any cytotoxicity. The optimal heat treatment for Ti-6AI-4V-5Cu alloy was solution treated at 930 ℃, at which it could exhibit both promising antibacterial performance and no cvtotoxicity.

Developments in diagnostic applications of saliva in human organ diseases

Saliva is one of the important body fluids that reflects normal internal characteristics and disease state of an individual.As a multi-composition oral fluid,has high potential for the surveillance of general health and disease,which contains various disease signal biomarkers and is non-invasive,convenient,fast and easy to be accepted by patients.At present,saliva is increasingly used as a biological fluid for diagnosis,monitoring systemic disease states and predicting disease progression,which has been verified.In this review,the molecular compositions and effectiveness of saliva as reliable biological fluid were discussed.Besides the latest research progress in the diagnosis of saliva related to 14 organs were reviewed.The factors affecting saliva diagnosis were discussed.The method to improve the accuracy of prediction through artificial intelligence combined with microfluidic chip was proposed,which laid the foundation for dealing with the prevention,diagnosis,and treatment of related diseases through saliva with great and long-term significance.