A New Technique to Measure Wear and Deformation of Retrieved Tibial Polyethylene

Changes in polyethylene thickness and weighing of implants are traditional methods to measure “wear”. Change in thickness comes from loss of material and deformation. Change in weight represents true wear but does not measure deformation. We used Microcomputed tomography (MicroCT) scans of retrieved tibial inserts to determine volumetric wear and polyethylene deformation. Our purpose was to validate the technique by analyzing retrieved mobile bearing (MB) and fixed bearing (FB) inserts.