A novel motorized bending apparatus for surgical plates

Surgical plates, which are used in various bone reconstruction surgeries, must be accurately bent intraoperatively or preoperatively. Manual bending is a time- and labor-consuming process, which sometimes results in residual stress to the plate after repeated operations. To overcome these problems, we propose a motorized bending apparatus for surgical plates that can automatically bend the plates to the target angle in a single trial, which may reduce the residual stress. Finite element analysis (FEA) was used to compensate for the springback and provide the proper inputs. To evaluate the performance of the apparatus, we performed tests with five reconstruction plates in the manual bending group and the apparatus-bending group, respectively, for angles of 15° and 30°. The apparatus-bending showed improved accuracy and precision. Also, the apparatus took much shorter times to perform the same tasks. The proposed method should reduce the surgical preparation time and provide convenience to surgeons.