Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

The Virtual Hip: An Anatomically Accurate Finite Element Model Based On The Visible Human Dataset, Jonathan M. Ford

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to determine if element decimation of a 3-D anatomical model affects the results of Finite Element Analysis (FEA). FEA has been increasingly applied to the biological and medical sciences. In order for an anatomical model to successfully run in FEA, the 3-D model’s complex geometry must be simplified, resulting in a loss of anatomical detail. The process of decimation reduces the number of elements within the structure and creates a simpler approximation of the model. Using the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Male dataset, a virtual 3-D representation of several structures of the …