Concurrent consideration of cortical and cancellous bone within continuum bone remodelling

Abstract: Continuum bone remodelling is an important tool for predicting the effects of mechanical stimuli on bone density evolution. While the modelling of only cancellous bone is considered in many studies based on continuum bone remodelling, this work presents an approach of modelling also cortical bone and the interaction of both bone types. The distinction between bone types is made by introducing an initial volume fraction. A simple point-wise example is used to study the behaviour of novel model options, as well as a proximal femur example, where the interaction of both bone types is demonstrated using initial density distributions. The results of the proposed model options indicate that the consideration of cortical bone remarkably changes the density evolution of cancellous bone, and should therefore not be neglected.