Diagnosing back problems and predicting the outcome of surgery could become a lot more accurate because of a project awarded to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee and Vanderbilt. With an estimated 80 percent to 90 percent of people in the United States experiencing lower back pain at some point in their lives, the orthopedic community is increasingly interested in predictive assessments of treatments. The National Institutes of Health and National Institute for Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases asked the team to develop a computational model that could eventually be used to predict in vivo contact stresses at the bearing surface interfaces, ligament forces that provide constraint and muscle forces of the vertebral bodies of the lower back. The clinical and computational data will be correlated and validated with the physicians and patients at Vanderbilt.
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