Achievement

IGERT fellow Christina Salas has been working on multi-scale investigation of the behavior of bones. She studied osteoporosis in distal femur fracture repaired with locking compression plates (LCP) in comparison with retrograde intramedullary (IM) nailing devices. A comminuted supracondylar fracture was created in osteoporotic human cadaveric femurs and synthetic fourth-generation composite femurs. The mean maximum load to failure for LCP repaired femora was higher than for that with IM nail. This macroscale investigation showed locking plates provided slightly higher stability (not statistically significant) but were associated with a much more complex failure mode (clinically significant) that might make it very difficult to perform post-fracture repair. During her internship at the University of California San Francisco, Christina Salas examined the possible quantification of bone mineral density (BMD) determined locally using nanoindentation.