Dr. Ranjith AmarasingheBone diseases are one of the many diseases which people mainly suffer at their old ages such as osteoporosis. When people aged the production rate of the bone materials can be reduced as their bone dissolving rate is increasing. This will result in the low quality of the bone and bone materials. Low bone quality can affect the human bone mechanical structure which can cause a fracture in the bone or can be a root cause of another bone disease.

 

Dr. Ranjith Amarasinghe

Bone diseases are one of the many diseases which people mainly suffer at their old ages such as osteoporosis. When people aged the production rate of the bone materials can be reduced as their bone dissolving rate is increasing. This will result in the low quality of the bone and bone materials. Low bone quality can affect the human bone mechanical structure which can cause a fracture in the bone or can be a root cause of another bone disease.

Strength of this project was to identify these drawbacks and develop a novel method to pre-detect bone diseases that give validated results. Novel indentation mechanism has been identified by Three final year students from Mechanical Engineering Department in University of Moratuwa in order to detect and evaluate human tissue mechanical properties. 

Dr. Angelo Karunaratne

Vidushan Dissanayake, M.G. Kasun Devinda and Madushan Ehelagasthanne have developed this device with the help of their two supervisors Dr.Angelo Karunarathne and Dr.Rangith Amarasinghe who are senior lectures of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Moratuwa.

Dr. Angelo Karunarathne commented as follows,

“Osteoporosis is a silent disease. Nowadays It’s been identified after someone gets cracks in their bones in a fell down or in an accident. Bone diseases, which means abnormalities of the bones which cause weaken or injured bones. Aging is one of the main factors that affect the mechanical properties of the bone. Throughout the human lifetime, bone cells are gradually producing and dissolving the bone material. If this dissolving rate gets increased than the bone producing rate in the human body, that condition we identified as Osteoporosis.

Identifying these diseases are difficult as there are no symptoms in the body as the bone is dissolving. Existing clinical methods to identify bone diseases can be categorized as,

Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA or DEXA)

Quantitative computed tomography (QCT)

Qualitative ultrasound (QUS)

which can mainly measure the bone mineral density (BMD) of the bones. When considering the above available test methods in the present world, the Dual X-ray Absorptiometry test (i.e. DEXA) is the most commonly used clinical test. DEXA is a quantitative test carried out using x-ray images to measure bone mineral density (i.e. BMD). The population tested as suffering from bone diseases (ex: osteoporosis) consists of two fractions, though the test may indicate a person not suffering from osteoporosis, this doesn't imply that they all are 100% secure from bone fractures. Because DEXA results only based on quantitative measurements. Also cost for a DEXA test cost is around $60-$100 in Sri Lanka and it cannot afford for two-third of Sri Lankan people. Our intention was to develop a device that can generate validated results and tests of this device should be affordable to Sri-Lankan people.”

According to the Dr.Rangith Amarasinghe :

“This the novel mechanism has the ability to perform an indentation to the human tissue under the micro level while gathering data which are proportional to the indentation depth. Gathered data are evaluating in real-time in order to provide validated results.

Bones has a comparably hard layer called periosteum on the bone surface. In growing individuals, the periosteum of the long bones is 70-150 micrometers (0.07-0.15 millimeters) thick and it thins with age. The proposed machine needs to penetrate through the periosteum layer and indent further to cortical bone. But there is a maximum indentation depth to protect the bone from unnecessary cracks or damages. Normally human bones have micro cracks. Those cracks are formed due to human activities and those fractures can recover naturally by the time being with the bone remodeling process. The average Micro crack length of bones is 488 ± 151µm and the average micro-crack width of bone is 88±21µm. This novel portable device has the ability to maintain indentation depths below the micro-crack range and perform tests by getting more validated results in real-time.“

Kasun , Vidushan and Madushan Replied to on our further questions as follows,

In this device there is a specially developed control system that includes an LCD touch display as the human machining interface. Mainly this HMI consists of 3 panels or windows. Panel number one is the main window which has the functionality of inserting patient details such as name, number, age and gender, test location, and sample rate.

Panel number two shows 2 graphs which are represented percentage change of deflection against the time. Through this display, the doctor who does the bone test can observe the percentage change of indentation in needle against time in order to conclude the correct quality of the bone. 

3^rd panel shows the interpretation of the test results in a severity indicator window. By looking at this window doctor can conclude the final test results on the patient’s bone quality whether it is on a scale of better, good, osteoporotic, or severe osteoporotic. 

The validation of the instrument has been done by running tests on bone samples which we received from Kaluthara Hospital. According to the generated results, we concluded that this device has the ability to achieve successful results for a given bone sample. And furthermore, these results show a significant change when the hardness of the bone changes with the indentation depth, and also results clearly show the elastic and plastic deformations of the bone when it undergoes the indentation. Moreover, achieving the change of disease severity with respect to the age of the patient is proving these results are precisely accurate.

Because of the successful results of this project achieved, a research article that we wrote got selected by IEEE SENSORS 2017 conference and it will be published to the world in near future. And furthermore, we are on our way to get a patent license for this novel bio-medical device.

Kasun ,Vidushan and Madushan