Project
SpineVib – Development of a vibro-acoustic method to assess fixation in spinal applications
Each year, thousands of people undergo instrumented spinal procedures in Belgium to relieve pain and to maintain or restore spinal stability. With an ageing population and people who stay active for a longer time, the numbers of spinal conditions requiring surgical treatment are increasing. Many of the instrumented spinal procedures involve the use of pedicle screws. These are screws placed in a vertebra to fixate e.g. a rod. One of the major reasons for revision is loosening of a pedicle screw. The goal of SpineVib is to develop a non-invasive intra-operative measurement method to assess the fixation of a pedicle screw in a vertebra. To develop this method, vibration analysis and techniques from Structural Health Monitoring will be used. SpineVib will investigate the vibrational behavior of pedicle-bone systems in a broad frequency range and will investigate which parameters in the time and frequency domain are sensitive to a change in fixation. This investigation will be done in silico, using a validated model of a vertebra with a screw, and in vitro, using modal analyses on artificial and cadaver bones. The developed method will be compared to two methods that are the current stateof- the-art to assess the fixation of a pedicle screw, namely pull-out force measurements and measurements of the displacement under a toggle-load. The generic results of this project could have implications for the development of a post-operative method for fixation assessment of pedicle screws.