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Medical device designers boost efficiency with SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks

SolidWorks announces Design Contest winners

The human body is an amazing mechanism. The body's miraculous design is meant to work seamlessly behind -the scenes so that we humans can go about our daily activities without having to be aware of how the body functions, what mechanisms are in place to let us stand, sit, walk, or to perform such vital activities as chewing our food. The complexity of the body's design often becomes obvious when it malfunctions and medical experts and practitioners set about trying to fix it.

The Faculty of Dentistry, Oral Surgery Department at Okayama University, used SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks to develop an artificial jaw joint for use in patients suffering from broken jaw joints due to chronic rheumatoid arthritis, or who suffer from breathing difficulty caused by a retreated lower jawbone.

That's exactly what surgeons Tomoaki Kawamoto and Toshio Sugahara at the Faculty of Dentistry, Oral Surgery Department at Okayama University have been doing over the past decade. These surgeon researchers have carried out total-replacement anthroplasty using an artificial jaw joint for patients suffering from broken jaw joints due to chronic rheumatoid arthritis.

The malady is as painful as it sounds, and designing an artificial jaw joint is also more complex than you might imagine. In early designs, patients reported insufficient movement in their lower jaw, which caused surgeons Kawamoto and Sugahara to search for more effective ways of creating artificial joints that would better mimic the real thing. They needed a better way to fine-tune their designs.

The model for the Automated Labware Storage System contained over 300 parts (85 of them unique) and 35 subassemblies. The 3-member design team developed the model in less than 5 months and finished the first prototype just 8 weeks later.

Thanks to their dedication and medical knowledge and in no small part to SolidWorks® and COSMOSWorks™, Drs. Kawamoto and Sugahara succeed in their mission. Working from a 3D model of a face and jaw created in SolidWorks, their research team was able to experiment with different plate and screw materials and to run static stress tests to analyze how these materials would react to the stress generated by chewing. Their mesh model consisted of 42,387 nodes and 27,876 elements.

Like any experts in a particular field, the medical designers wanted to concentrate on the medical experiment at hand, and not have to think too much about the technology helping them achieve their tasks. The ease-of-use and effectiveness of both SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks allowed them to do just that.

Medi-Ject Corporation, the world leader in needle-free injection systems for drug delivery, relies upon SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks to identify and alter potential design problems before prototyping.

Now rheumatoid patients receiving jaw replacement surgery can also stop worrying too much about the mechanism that allows them to eat and drink with relative absence of pain and discomfort.

Furthering Drug Research and Applicability

Easily matching the complexity of the human body is the complexity of how the body reacts to medical drugs. Medical scientists are on a continuous search to discover and develop more effective drug treatments with the aid of design firms such as SAIGAN. A Beck Coulter company, SAIGAN builds and markets advanced robotics systems for use in drug-discovery research. Designers at the firm have found that the combination of SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks has allowed them to model and analyze robotics systems more efficiently with parts that have proven reliability, lighter weight, and that are less costly.

As part of a revolutionary experimental new cancer treatment, COSMOSEMS™ and SolidWorks play a vital role in testing certain features of the Genetronicss MedPulser®, a device that applies an electric pulse technology to cancer cells, making them more permeable to chemotherapeutic agents. View Genetronics video

And once a drug is developed, other medical researchers are helping to ensure its painless and efficient injection into the body. Medi-Ject Corp. is a world leader in needle-free injection systems for drug delivery. But that leadership role is not a given; the company has to continually improve its product line in order to stay ahead of the competition. The Medi-Ject design team has found that use of SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks enables them to create models quickly and then put them through numerous important "what if" scenarios to improve design before moving to prototypes.

Many such examples of how SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks are becoming the tool of choice for medical research and development occur on a daily basis. Design teams often need to run static analysis of parts to study stresses or deflections, thermal analysis of parts and assemblies to reveal heat-flux conditions, nonlinear analysis of parts within a complex 3D environment, vibration analysis and the many stresses associated with vibration frequencies, fluid-flow analysis, whether it be blood flow through the human body or needle-free injection delivery, and many other applications.

SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks have a minimal learning curve that allows researchers to employ technology quickly and effectively in a Windows environment from their desktops without getting slowed down by the technology. In medical research as in few other fields, the task at hand is where an expert's focus should be held, not on the troubleshooting tools that get in the way of design.

Download the PDF version of Analysis Guide for Medical Product Designers.