| Chronic low back pain afflicts many people, both within the United States and abroad. One cause of the pain is associated with contact between adjacent vertebrae. A common technique for alleviating severe back pain is to fuse the afflicted vertebrae causing the pain into a single solid bone mass. However, intervertebral fusion has had varied success resulting in incomplete fusion of the bones and persistent and painful intervertebral motions. One cause of failure of intervertebral fusion techniques is believed to be motions at the fusion site during the fusion process. Many different intervertebral fusion techniques have been developed to stabilize the region for fusion. Before clinical use, these fusion techniques are biomechanically tested in a cadaveric model for stability performance. However, in biomechanical testing it is common to only observe motion in the tested plane. Because of the three-dimensional nature of the spine, the current testing methodologies of quantifying spinal stability can underestimate the motions that occur within the site of fusion. Therefore, the goal of this research was to gain a better understanding of the motions that occur following stabilization techniques in order to improve clinical spinal intervention performance. This goal was achieved by creating a new in vitro biomechanical testing method, which included design of a new protocol and new testing machine, and evaluating two commonly used clinical stabilization techniques in an in vitro biomechanical testing method. |
