In-silico pelvis and sacroiliac joint motion-A review on published research using numerical analyses

Computational models of the human pelvis have become highly useful tools to assess mechanisms of injury, diagnostics and treatment options. The purpose of this systematic literature review was to summarize existing pelvic computer models, to assess their comparability and the measures taken for experimental validation.

Research on virtual simulations of the posterior pelvis and sacroiliac joint available from the ISI Web of Knowledge, PubMed and Scopus databases available until January 2018 were included.

From a total of 3938 articles, 33 studies matched the criteria. Thirteen studies reported on experimental biomechanics, of which seven were parametric. Thirteen studies focused on pelvic injury and surgery, three were clinical case reports. One study assessed the effects of lumbar surgery on the sacroiliac joint, three studies on diagnostics and the non-surgical treatment of the sacroiliac joint. The mode of load application, geometry, material laws and boundary conditions varied vastly between the studies. The majority excluded the lumbosacral transition as part of pelvic biomechanics, and used isotropic linear elastic material properties. Outcomes of the analyses were reported inconsistently with negative impact on their comparability, and validation was commonly conducted by literature with varying agreement of the loading conditions.

Comparability and validation are two major issues of present computational biomechanics of the pelvis. These issues diminish the transferability of the in-silico findings into real-life scenarios. In-vitro cadaveric models remain the realistic standard to account for the present computational analyses which simplify the complex nature of musculoskeletal tissues of the pelvis.