REVIEW ON EVALUATION METHODS OF FRACTURE HEALING

Fracture is one of the most important health problems in people’s life. Millions of people have fractures every year. However, there is no unified standard for fracture healing in the clinic. Most definitions of complete fracture healing are subjective evaluations based on X-ray films. However, it is not reliable to evaluate the biomechanical strength of bone according to the number of callus on X-ray, and the imaging time of callus lags behind the actual callus, which is not conducive to the evaluation of early fracture healing time. In addition, although more and more fracture patients have achieved imaging healing after injury, the bone quality and bone strength of the whole body and local fracture have not returned to the normal level, and the probability of re-fracture has increased significantly, which has brought great pain to their families. Fracture healing is affected by many factors, such as age, fracture site, whether to fix the fracture site, and osteoporosis. Therefore, when evaluating the fracture healing status of patients, we should not only evaluate whether the fracture is healed but also evaluate its healing. By analyzing the previous research methods of fracture healing, in this paper, we systematically summarize the evaluation methods of fracture healing from the perspectives of computer tomography, ultrasound, bone density, biosensors, and biomechanics by analyzing previous research methods of fracture healing, aiming to provide reference for researchers in related fields.