BIOMECHANICAL EVALUATION OF EFFECTS OF MANDIBULAR MONOFOCAL DISTRACTION OSTEOGENESIS BY USING FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS METHOD

Purpose: distraction osteogenesis is the biologic process of new bone formation between bone segments that are gradually separated by incremental traction. the traction generates tension on the skeletal and surrounding soft tissue structures, which stimulates new bone formation parallel to the vector of distraction. at present study it is aimed to examine biomechanic effects of monofocal distraction osteogenesis by the method of finite elements. material and methods: in our study, monofocal distraction osteogenesis examined to treat mandibular deficiencies. a 3-dimensional model of totally dentate mandibular bone of young man was used as the basis of a mandibular finite element model in this study. the 3d image of the mandible was imported into msc mentat (msc software corporation, ca, usa) version 2005 for pre-processing and modeling. stress patterns of the bony tissues of fixation materials were calculated as well. von mises stress, maximum principle stress and minimum principle stress values in mega pascal were used to compare the stresses of the bony tissues and fixation materials. results: it is revealed that von mises stress, maximum tension stress and minimum tension stresses focused around first screws of plates in both segments in monofocal distraction. conclusion: in monofocal distraction technique when screws are evaluated for von mises stresses, it was observed that very low level stresses occured on last 2 screws in model. in this respect it was seen that last 2 screws were unnecessary