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Bone drilling is a major part of modern orthopaedic surgery associated with the principles of internal fixation of fractured bones. At present, information related to drilling forces, rate of drill bit penetration and drill bit rotational speed is not available to orthopaedic surgeons, clinicians and researchers as bone drilling is performed manually. This research demonstrates that orthopaedic surgery involving the drilling of bone can greatly benefit from the technology of automation/ mechatronics, which allows the collection and storage of the drilling data for analysis as well as for the improvement of the drilling procedure. The research also represents a significant contribution to the development of a drilling system for the enhancement of safety and/or as a diagnostic tool for the evaluation of bone strength. A novel automated experimental rig, which enables drilling tests to be carried out in a controlled environment, has been developed. The investigation for the enhancement of safety involves the detection of drill bit break-through on a femoral shaft in the presence of system compliance and inherent fluctuation of drilling forces. Since these two factors affect the detection of drill bit break-through, a robust and reliable method based on a modified Kalman filter has been developed. When applied to the force difference between successive samples and the rotational speed, the modified Kalman filter has been found to be very effective in establishing trends and ironing out major fluctuations caused by the system compliance and inherent drilling force fluctuation. The evaluation of bone strength related to the cancellous bone at the proximal femur has resulted in the establishment of a positive relationship between the average drilling force and bone mineral density (BMD), obtained from bone densitometry, which is used to estimate bone strength in clinical practice. The correlation has been found to depend on the direction of drilling. This is indicated by a linear relationship obtained in the anterior-posterior direction (perpendicular to the cervical axis), which is not interchangeable with the relationship in the direction of the cervical axis. Findings of this research have indicated that analysis of bone drilling forces has the potential to provide additional information about the strength of bone.

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This thesis embodies a novel investigation into the cellular role of the specific immune system in fracture repair.

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Knowledge of anatomy is an elementary step towards the understanding of the human body. First used by Alphonse Bertillon as an identification system, anthropometry refers to the measurements of human individuals. In orthopaedics, comparative analysis is widely used in the understanding of morphological variance due to races, sex and pathological conditions. The characterization of bone and joint geometry has also been a foundation of modern surgical implant design. Traditional anthropometric studies rely on physical measurements by means of osteometric table. Recent advancements of 3-D imaging modalities and image processing techniques have empowered more fine-grained anthropometric characterization. The inspiration for the study is: - the understanding of anatomy originating from the clinical domain have shown to contribute to undesirable inconsistency in the image processing domain. - the difficulty of existing automated anthropometric methodology in handling pathological femur. - the tedious amount of manual and subjective work involved with the increasing amount of high resolution imaging data. The aim of the study is to: - develop a consistent and robust methodology in accurate extraction of anthropometric parameters on the femur. - increase the level of automation on the process of anthropometric parameter extraction. With the bridging of anthropometry and the image processing disciplines, a robust methodology of anthropometric parameter extraction with high level of automation was developed, implemented and tested. A dataset comprised of femoral CT scans of 19 healthy Australian, 10 healthy Japanese, 15 Japanese diagnosed with primary or secondary hip osteoarthritis and 20 adult sheep was utilized for testing. Intra-class correlation and Cronbach's α were extensively employed to evaluate the intra-rater, interrater and repeated scans consistency of the proposed methodology. High correlation values (mean > 0.95) were noted suggesting a high consistency of the methodology. All healthy and osteoarthritis human datasets were processed successfully. With the structural similarity between the sheep and human femur, the robustness was further demonstrated by accurate processing of the sheep dataset without the need of any modification of the underlying methodology. The methodology proposed is highly automated and requires very few user interactions in the parameter extraction stage.

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