News

UW team uses ‘David’ in research

A University of Wisconsin research team, using Michelangelo’s sculpture “David” as their model, has developed a technology that can predict the placement for fractures in stationary objects.

UW mechanical engineering professor Vadim Shapiro and Florida International University professor Igor Tsukanov presented their “Scan and Solve” technology at the International Conference on Computational and Experimental Engineering and Sciences in Honolulu last week.

According to Tsukanov, he and Shapiro are currently working with UW Medicine to apply the technique to medical implants or replacements to create “patient-specific implants and patient-specific surgeries.”

According to Michael Freytag, a UW graduate student who has been working on the project for the past few years, the Scan and Solve technology allows researchers to take an existing object and figure the stress distribution inside it by creating a 3-D image of the surface.

Freytag said the technology uses the acquired geometry of a surface to determine the stress distribution and predict where fractures are most likely to occur. He added the new technology streamlines the process of spatial analyses, making it much faster and more accurate than it has been in the past.

The new technique automates all the steps and conversions of the data sets created, making many of them unnecessary.

“In the past we had to simplify the model and still retain as much detail as possible,” Freytag said. “Now we can work directly with the original data.”

Tsukanov said the team used the already existing spatial data on Michelangelo’s “David” gathered by past researchers to apply their technique to the famous work of art and compare it with the current knowledge of the wear on the statue.

The latest analyses, according to Tsukanov, were the same as past analyses by other researchers, and their prediction for fractures matched those that have already occurred on “David.”

The difference was that their findings were much quicker and easier.

“We don’t have to simplify the geometry, basically,” Tsukanov said. “We’re using the original data. You can save human time by the automation of all these steps.”

According to Tsukanov, the David model analyzed the factor of gravity on a structure, but the technique can also predict the effects of other factors on an object as well.

He said Scan and Solve can take into account the effects of temperature, sun radiation and even activity.

It is the ability to measure this last factor that Tsukanov said may have the largest impact in the future, for medical procedures.

He said hip replacements will be more individualized and easier because patients’ bodies can now be scanned, while in the past it would have been necessary to remove parts from the patient’s body.