Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

4871

Yuxin Qi

Date

2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Engineering

Concentration

Mechanical Engineering

Committee Chair

Gladius Lewis

Committee Member

Teong E Tan

Committee Member

Edward Lin

Committee Member

John Hochstein

Abstract

The most common pathology of the cervical spine is degenerative disc disease(DDD) and the surgical methods most often used to treat symptomatic cases of this condition are anterior cervical discectomy (ACD), anterior cervical discectomy followed by fusion (ACDF), and implantation of a total disc replacement (TDR). Although there are many literature reports on finite element analysis (FEA) of models of the cervical spine subjected to simulated surgical treatment(s), few modeled the full spine (C1-C7), very few analyzed a model in which degeneration was simulated at a disc, none compared all three of these popular surgical methods,and very few focused on kinematics of the spine. Since the performance of many activities of daily living involves the motion of cervical spine units, it is useful to determine the kinematic reponse of these units. The purpose of the present study was to determine the influence of these three popular surgical treatment methods on the rotation of the motion at each of the functional units of a single-level degenerated cervical spine (C5-C6), under s series of clinically-relevant applied loading. Thus five FEA models were analyzed; namely, INTACT, DEGEN, ACD, ACDF and TDR models. With respect to the simulated surgical treatments, the principal finding was that rotation motion at the treatment level (C5-C6) as well as at each of the other levels of the spine model is best preserved when the TDR model was used. This suggests that TDR is an attractive surgical option, but this can only be confirmed from the results of well-planned clinical trials.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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