Biomechanical Modeling and Simulation of Spine

Cervical spine degenerative instability is a common disease in clinic. At present, the surgical treatment for this disease mainly includes fusion and artificial disc replacement. Degenerative changes at adjacent segments are induced or accelerated due to limited motion of the fused segments after fusion. In contrast, artificial disc replacement can ensure the normal range of motion of adjacent segments, so as to avoid the acceleration of adjacent segment degeneration. Therefore, artificial discs are increasingly popular among clinicians and patients. At present, the research methods for artificial disc replacement mainly include postoperative follow-up, in vitro cadaver experiment and finite element research. The advantage of finite element analysis is that the biomechanical response after artificial disc replacement can be analyzed without cadaver or animal samples, and the data difficult to obtain in general experiments, such as internal disc pressure, and ligament stress, can be obtained. An example of a single-segment artificial disc replacement model will be illustrated in this section.