Population ageing explains the increasing interest in studying the osteoarticular system. Implanting biomaterials in bone to restore the organ functionality has allowed considerable progresses in orthopaedic and dental surgery. Despite a routine clinical use, implant failures, which may have dramatic consequences, still occur and are difficult to anticipate. Surgeons introduce biomaterials in a bone cavity formed by drilling, damaging bone tissue but also stimulating bone healing. To do so, non standardized empirical methods are often employed. During bone healing, ‘low level’ interfacial micromotions stimulate bone remodeling but fibrous tissue develops instead of bone in the case of ‘excessive’ relative micromotion between bone tissue and the implant surface. Failures are often due to degraded bone remodeling at the bone-implant interface, a multiscale phenomenon of an interdisciplinary nature which remains poorly understood.
The aim of BoneImplant is to investigate the multi-time (from the microsecond up to the month) variations of the multiscale (from the nanometer to the organ scale) biomechanical properties of the bone-implant interface as a function of the implant environment, following an approach typical from engineering sciences. BoneImplant focuses on the description of the properties of bone tissue located around the implant during osseointegration. The originality of the approach lies in: i) multiphysical multimodality measurements, ii) the development of advanced multiscale bone model accounting for remodeling phenomena, isogeometric contact analysis and iii) the fundamental nature of this problem (understanding the time evolution of the properties of an interface) with important implications in terms of public health.
