A tour of the laboratory
The Brisbane Shoulder Fellowship group toured the CARF laboratory at Queensland University of Technology.
Pictured are five visiting orthopaedic surgeons, from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland and India, with Ken Cutbush, Brisbane Shoulder Fellowship Co-Director, and Tristan Shuker, Research Assistant.
Taking the fellows through the laboratory is part of the programme rather than an outing. Much of the research that informs how these operations are planned is done on equipment of this kind, and seeing it makes the resulting papers easier to read critically.
What biomechanics research contributes
Biomechanics is the study of how forces act on the body and how the structures of a joint respond to them. In shoulder surgery it is used to answer questions that cannot be answered from patient outcomes alone: how a repaired tendon behaves under load, how far a graft can be stressed before it fails, how the position of an implant changes the movement available, and which of several ways of fixing the same structure holds best.
Work of this kind is done on specimens, on models and in computer simulation, using testing rigs, motion capture and imaging. It does not establish how patients will do, and it is not a substitute for clinical follow up. What it does is narrow the range of options worth testing in patients, and explain why a technique that looks reasonable in principle fails in practice. Individual results vary.
Why fellows take part in research
A fellow who has worked on a study understands from the inside how data are collected and where the weaknesses in a method lie. That changes how they read other people's papers for the rest of their career, which is the more durable benefit of the exercise.
It also gives the questions that arise in clinic and theatre somewhere to go. A surgeon operating at the limits of what is established runs into problems that the literature does not answer, and a research group with the equipment to test them is how those questions get taken further rather than simply set aside.
Related information
See our post on the QUT joint biomechanics research centre, and our research, publications and shoulder fellowship pages.