Posted on Sunday, September 26 2010 @ 22:10 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing and Advanced Materials IFAM in Dresden, Germany, have created a new titanium foam with the same structural configuration as the inside of a human bone:
Dr.-Ing Peter Quadbeck of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing and Advanced Materials is lead developer of the "TiFoam" project and has created a titanium foam implant that is rigid and flexible like a real human bone. Most importantly, it allows ingrowth into surrounding bones.
Other massive bone implants have not worked in the past because they contained characteristics that are different from the human skeleton, such as stiffness. Massive bone implants that are not flexible like a real human bone causes more stress to be put on the implant instead of the adjacent bone, which, as a result, could lead to the deterioration of that bone.
More details
at DailyTech.
