Shape Index of the proximal ulna articular surface

Troclear axis of the distal humerus

Welcome! You have found Goodwin Lawlor’s postgraduate research space on the web. Here you can find ideas, software, and data created during doctoral research at the Bioengineering Research Centre in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering in University College Dublin, Ireland.

The research field is Orthopaedic Biomechanics, the application of mechanical engineering solutions to orthopaedic problems. Typically, it falls into two categories:

• Investigation of the mechanical causes of diseases.
• Design and testing of medical devices.

My thesis project focuses on the mechanical causes of Osteoarthritis or “degenerative joint disease”. Simply put, this is the wearing away of joint cartilage that leads to pain, inflammation, and loss of function. The project tries to correlate the variation of joint shapes to the area of contact between these joints and how this affects the disease progression of joint wear.

Though mechanics is our core competency, the fields of physical anthropology and computer science have been heavily borrowed from. Particulary from:

• Geometric Morphometrics or 3D Statistical Shape Analysis
• Medical Image Analysis
• Computer Graphics
• Computational Geometry