Numerical simulation of stress-shielding at the bone-implant interface under shear loading

Inserting a titanium implant in bone tissue may modify its physiological loading and therefore cause bone resorption, a phenomenon known as stress-shielding [1]. While monitoring and preventing stress-shielding is necessary to ensure the surgical success, it remains difficult to experimentally retrieve information on the properties of the interfacial tissues at the scale of 1-100 μm from the implant surface, where this phenomenon is localized. Numerical modelling represents a complementary tool to better understand phenomena related to the coupled bone-implant system due to the difficulty of measuring the stress distribution in vivo. The aim of this study is to investigate numerically the influence of various geometrical and material parameters on the local stress field around a bone-implant interface (BII) subject to shear loading.