Engineering Commons^™

Improved Orthopaedic Repairs Through Mechanically Optimized, Adhesive Biomaterials, Stephen Wheeler Linderman

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Despite countless surgical advances over the last several decades refining surgical approaches, repair techniques, and tools to treat tendon and tendon-to-bone injuries, we are still left with repair solutions that rely on fairly crude underlying mechanical principles. Musculoskeletal soft tissues have evolved to transfer high loads by optimizing stress distribution profiles across the tissue at each length scale. However, instead of mimicking these natural load transfer mechanisms, conventional suture approaches are limited by high load transfer across only a small number of anchor points within tissue. This leads to stress concentrations at anchor points that often cause repair failure as …