Novel anchor-type proximal femoral nail for the improvement of bone-fixation integrity in treating intertrochanteric fractures: an experimental and computational characterization study

This study introduces a novel anchor-type proximal femoral nail (AT-PFN) to improve the bone-fixation integrity over the standard screw-type nail (SST-PFN). Quasi-static incremental cyclic load test was performed to investigate load-displacement, cumulative deformation energy, time-strain, and backbone curves. The finite element analysis (FEA) was implemented to identify the stress and strain distributions. Additionally, non-destructive dynamic tests were conducted, and the measurements were processed using statistical pattern recognition, based on vector autoregression and principal component analysis to investigate the nonlinearity due to bone-fixation interface. The results demonstrate that the AT-PFN significantly improves the bone-fixation integrity compared to SST-PFN.