Abstract
Designing a morphologically well-fitted hip implant to a patient anatomy is desirable to improve surgical outcomes since a commercial ready-made hip implant may not well conform to the patient joint. In this study, biomechanical stability of patient-specific hip implants with two different stem lengths was compared and discussed using a 3D finite element analysis (FEA). The FEA results in this study showed that an increase in stem length brings about more the peaked von-Mises stress (PVMS) in the prosthesis and less in the femur. However the decrease in von-Mises stress in the femur causes stress shielding phenomenon that usually leads to considerable bone resorption. Although, in biomechanical stability point of view, this work recommends the use of smaller stems, the length of stem must be determined by considering both the von-Mises stress and the stress-shielding phenomenon.