ABSTRACT
Bone mills in current practice produce morselized grafts of sizes that are more or less standardized when their mean sizes are plotted on a graph [1]. Rotating bone mills in current practice are usually equipped with coarse and fine rasps to obtain both large and small bone morsels, respectively. These morsels, when impacted in the medullary cavity of a femur during revision hip arthroplasty, form a "neomedullary cavity." Clinically the outcome of a revision arthroplasty depends on the mechanical integrity of this layer of impacted graft and its ability to support a revision prosthesis as well as other factors [2-5]. Thus, we were interested in investigating the mechanical integrity of impacted grafts at various levels of impaction, keeping all other factors constant except the morsel size. The tests were aimed at establishing whether morsel size was critical in influencing the efficiency of impaction. A series of in vitro impaction tests were pelformed on morselized grafts of two different sizes obtained from the same rotating type of
Bavadekar
bone mill (Noviomagnus, Spierings, Nijmegen) currently used by surgeons at the University hospital (St-Luc University Hospital, Brussels).
