Mechanical competence of proximal tibia in persons with spinal cord injury: development of a computational framework...

This study developed a framework to quantify the mechanical competence of the proximal tibia in spinal cord injury (SCI) and able-bodied (AB) participants. We created subject-specific finite element models of 53 proximal tibias (22 SCI, 5 AB) and quantified two torsional (stiffness, K_t and ultimate strength, T_ult) and two compressive (stiffness, K_c and ultimate strength, C_ult) metrics. We report the distributions of K_t, T_ult, K_c, and C_ult, and a minimum number of metrics required to quantify the mechanical competence of the proximal tibia. This work provides a foundation for confidence interval-based thresholds to predict fracture risk in persons with SCI.