Technique to Quantify Subsurface Cracks in Retrieved Polyethylene Components Using Micro-CT
Bibliographic record
Abstract
No current method to study delamination and subsurface cracking in polyethylene joint replacement components provides accurate, nondestructive, and quantitative measurements. A technique to study damage both at and below the surface could be of great benefit. We report the development of a micro-CT technique to nondestructively examine and quantify subsurface cracking in retrieved polyethylene tibial inserts. Five severely delaminated inserts and two never-implanted inserts were obtained from our institution's implant retrieval library and scanned with micro-CT. The insert subsurface was examined for cracks, and their location and widths were measured using a digital line tool. Subsurface cracks were readily apparent only in the images of the delaminated inserts. Cracks ran horizontally, just below the articular and back-side surfaces, and vertically at the center and lateral edges of the inserts and at the tibial post. Cracks ranged from 0.12 to 6.01 mm below the surface, with widths of 0.06-0.97 mm. Micro-CT can nondestructively visualize and quantify subsurface cracks. This is an enhancement to its previously reported use to quantify surface deviations from wear. Micro-CT is well suited for longitudinal pin-on-disk and wear simulator trials, in addition to studies of retrieved components.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".