| Description |
Finite element (FE) analysis has proven to be useful when studying the biomechanics of the cervical spine. Although many FE studies of the cervical spine have been published, they typically develop their models using commercial software, making the sharing of models between researchers difficult. The goal of this study was to develop and evaluate three FE models of the adult cervical spine using open source software, and to freely provide these models to the scientific community. These models were evaluated against available experimental data. Despite the fact that all three models were assigned identical material properties and boundary conditions, there was notable variation in their biomechanical behavior. It was therefore apparent that these differences were the result of morphological differences between the models. |
