Fuji film and ultrasound measurement of total knee arthroplasty contact areas.

Abstract

This article describes tibiofemoral contact area measurement results from tests on 1 commercial total knee arthroplasty (TKA) using 2 experimental methods-fuji film and diagnostic ultrasound. The study presents a novel diagnostic ultrasound technique developed specifically for measuring TKA contact areas. Because most experimental investigations have been concerned with interimplant comparison, this article is one of few parametric TKA studies in the literature. Fuji film and ultrasound provide lower and upper bound contact area measurements based on their physical operating principles; this implies that no single measurement method can be relied on exclusively to glean contact area data. Designers should be cautious in using contact area and contact stress as the exclusive predictors of TKA failure.