This award supports fundamental research to uncover the factors that contribute to atypical femoral fracture. Atypical femoral fracture is a rare side effect of long-term use of some drugs to treat osteoporosis. Osteoporosis, or a decrease in bone strength, is responsible for over two million bone fractures annually in the United States. This increases mortality and decreases quality-of-life. This project will make a computer model of atypical femoral fracture, based on images from real patients. It will then be used to study how the effects of bone geometry and material properties (for example, how hard or soft a bone is) combine to determine fracture risk. This new understanding of atypical femoral fracture made possible by this project will ultimately improve the ability to identify those at risk and may also enable new drug discovery to avoid all types of bone fracture. These longer-term outcomes will result in improved quality of life for patients and reduced health care costs. This project will also include activities to improve long term faculty diversity in science and engineering through outreach to groups underrepresented in science and engineering.
There is currently neither a systematic experimental or computational study that has identified which factors are the most important determinants of atypical femoral fracture, nor a suitable computational model for assessing such types of fracture. Thus, the overall goal of this project is to identify the fundamental mechanisms that lead to atypical femoral fracture using a novel, multimodal, image-based, and multiscale computational bone model. The project will develop and validate multiscale whole femur computational models based on magnetic resonance imaging and high resolution micro-computed tomography. This new model will be used to determine the individual and coupled effects of macro- and microscale properties on atypical femoral fracture, as well as the critical levels of these factors that would lead to atypical femoral fracture. As a result, this novel computational modeling approach will provide unique information on the most important determinants of atypical femoral fracture that cannot be directly identified by experiments.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
