Biomechanical Study of Cervical Spine with Pathology

The cervical spine is one of the most complex structures of the human skeleton. The knowledge of the cervical spine kinematics is a very important tool for many clinical applications such as diagnosis, treatment and surgical interventions and for the development of new spinal implants. The finite element method (FEM) is a well-known and widely used numerical method to simulate structural behaviour of spine. The main goal of this paper was to create a 3D finite element model of cervical segment C4-C5-C6 using computed tomography (CT) data, in order to analyse and compare anterior cervical fusion and / or posterior cervical fusion as possible treatments for a fracture of type C2.2 according to the AO spine classification. As expected, with this study it was concluded that the anterior and posterior cervical fusion provides the best results when compared to the other types of cervical fusion studied.