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Managing the outcome of bone fracture healing is one of the most challenging tasks that a
veterinary orthopedic surgeon has to accomplish. On top of the difficulties involved with
unusual patient morphology, tight budgets and often short times to plan out surgeries in
traumatic cases, surgeons have to deal with the delicate trade-off between assuring fracture
stability and leaving enough interfragmentary motion to promote optimal bone healing on
a case by case basis. While handbooks provide general guidelines for surgeons to follow in
some situations, decisions are still often based on their experience and expertise gained on
previous cases.

Subject-specific models display the potential to positively alter the outcome of surgical operations
by providing surgeons with numerical twins to test treatments on. They have
previously been shown to be able to reproduce mechanical responses of both intact and
orthopedically repaired bones. A continuation of these works is conducted here.
In this thesis, an exploratory study is conducted to assess the capability of a Continuum
Damage Mechanics-based remodeling model to represent the healing characteristics found
in bone fracture healing. Along the way, the full numerical pipeline from the initial CT
image to the Finite Element simulation is didactically presented and improvements made
to it are detailed.

Results include improvements to the image-to-mesh pipeline to increase its modularity and
robustness. Meshes generated using the improved pipeline show greatly enhanced quality
characteristics.
Results also show that the extension of the Continuum Damage Mechanics-based remodeling
model is able to qualitatively describe the multi-staged nature of bone fracture healing
from a mechanical point of view.

Numerical simulation --- bone remodeling --- bone fracture healing --- mesh generation --- image to mesh --- mesh manipulation --- continuum damage mechanics --- Ingénierie, informatique & technologie > Ingénierie mécanique