Ex vivo experiments on femurs to assess metastatic bone strength

45e Congrès de la Société de Biomécanique, Metz, France, 26-/10/2020 - 28/10/2020Femoral fractures are a common issue for metastatic cancer patients. This type of fracture can occur during every day activities (Benca et al. 2017). Metastatic lesions can be osteoblastic, osteolytic or mixed but, mechanically, lytic lesions are more critical for the femoral strength (Benca et al. 2017). Based on a clinical scoring (Mirel's score), fracture predictions are overestimated and poorly predicted (Mirels 1989; Van der Linden et al. 2004; Benca et al. 2017), which leads to over-surgery. This scoring system is based on four following variables: metastases' site, size and type, and patient's pain (Mirels 1989). Hence, clinical studies do not focus on bone strength, but mainly on metastases characteristics and patient's pain. Finite element models, based on Quantitative Computed Tomography (QCT) imaging, were carried out to predict failure load (e.g., Kaneko et al. 2008; Tanck et al. 2009; Yosibash et al. 2014). In the context of metastatic bone, for a local validation, only one study has been published to study the major and minor principal strains using stereo-correlation (Sas et al. 2020) on cemented femur. The aim of this study was to provide experimental dataset to assess finite element models froma strain point of view