Materials Technology
Part A: Failure Analysis
Nowadays technologies breakthrough in numerous branches of industries that allows making sufficiently magnificent things including different devises and helpful equipment based on different kinds of materials and alloys have revolutionized medical industry as well. Achieved results implied reasonable grounds for making possible of using sufficient approaches for creating innovative tools in medicine and all around. Considering latest implementation of achievements in material processing and designing solutions in view of inception of replacement hip technology for wide range usage in Australia it’s necessary to pay attention at the opposite side of pointed step in order to estimate both pros and cons it brings. MoM hip replacements have been in clinical use since 1936. Several generations are recognised but all use both bearing surfaces made from cobalt-chromium-molybdenum alloy20.
Early devices such as the McKee-Farrar suffered from high friction, sometimes due to equatorial contact or ‘clutch-coning’. However, some survived 30 years of clinical use and showed very little wear. Improvements in manufacturing in the 1990s enabled a revival of this potentially low wearing hip. For the current generation of devices, laboratory studies have shown 100 fold less volumetric wear rates of MoM hip replacements when compared to metal-on-polyethylene (MoP) hips. This has resulted in more than 500,000 implantations of current generation MoM hip replacements over the last 15 years. MoM bearing surfaces are therefore not new and have been used in some volume over perhaps a 30 year period. Despite the fact that great values being provided by the possibility of artificial joints being used for helping people live full and long life, some unscrupulous companies can always get interested in this area of interest as in a source of getting benefits and profits not taking care about consequences, what, actually, happened in case of sub-company named DePuy.
Orthopaedic that was made by Johnson & Johnson organization that took place couple of years ago. Case itself describes the situation when major manufacturer of medical devices, a company as it was mentioned above - DePuy, announced the withdrawal from the market of one of their hip replacement (or prothesis) systems, called the ASR. Initially, it may seem that nothing horribly wrong happened, but to estimate reasons and problems, which mostly caused undertaking of such measures it’s necessary to outline that the steps of taking out of their products from the market was done only after represented data about considerable issues from British National Joint Registry, despite the fact that the company DePuy had been aware for a long time of problems with artificial hips from the Australian Orthopedic National Joint Replacement Registry (which is surging control registry that records very high percentage of hip replacement done in Australia also it controls whether there is a real necessity of hip being replaced and the considers cases of unnecessary revisions in terms of the old joints out and second ones in) but the joint system still …
