Manual vs. automatic meshing for FEA bone strain prediction: validation against experimental data

Despite recent progress, Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of bone based on microCT imaging involves many manual steps and assumptions, being time consuming and error prone.As a consequence, these different modeling strategies may not necessary lead to the same results. Therefore, the objective of this project is to compare and highlight the strength and weaknesses of two FEA procedures. The 1st procedure is mostly manual and based on commercial software for segmentation, surface extraction and volume meshing. The 2nd procedure is semi-automatic, developed at LMAF for subject-specific FEA model generation. During this project, each step of the two procedures will be compared to highlight the potential differences between the methods. The 1st procedure will be achieved and supervised at the LBO and the 2nd one at the LMAF. Finally, the two FEA will be validated with respect to experimental data available at LMAF. This work will improve FEA of bone based on microCT.