A fully implantable telemetry system for the long-term measurement of habitual bone strain.
Long-term in-vivo recordings of habitual bone strain in freely moving animals are needed to better understand the everyday mechanical loading environment responsible for bone-tissue maintenance. However, wireless methods to make such recordings are scarce. We report on the successful customisation of a commercially available voltage transmitter hooked-up to a strain-gauge rosette, its subcutaneous implantation in rabbits, and the quality of the implant's strain-gauge recordings. Continuous wireless recordings of a completely operational strain-gauge rosette glued to the mandibular surface of a freely moving rabbit could be made up to 33h. The resolution of the system was 1.5 microstrains/bit. The noise in the signal was 4.5 microstrains. To facilitate the automatic counting of bone-strain events in the retrieved data, and to calculate their peak amplitude, a novel approach is presented. The described technique enables the quantification of the daily bone-strain history defining the architecture and composition of bone tissue, and can help to further elucidate the strain parameters which influence bone tissue.
de Jong
W C
WC
Department of Functional Anatomy, Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam (ACTA), Research Institute MOVE, University of Amsterdam and VU University Amsterdam, Meibergdreef 15, 1105 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands. w.c.dejong@amc.uva.nl
Koolstra
J H
JH
van Ruijven
L J
LJ
Korfage
J A M
JA
Langenbach
G E J
GE
D000818:Animals; D001732:Bite Force; D055119:Elastic Modulus / Q000502:physiology; D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D006184:Habits; D008297:Male; D018670:Monitoring, Ambulatory / Q000295:instrumentation*; D019736:Prostheses and Implants; D011817:Rabbits; D013314:Stress, Mechanical; D013686:Telemetry / Q000295:instrumentation*; D014159:Transducers