Design of a suture anchor based on the superelasticity of the Ni-Ti alloy.

We have designed and manufacture a prototype of a new anchoring system for soft bone tissue fixation, based on the superelasticity of the Ni-Ti alloy. The anchoring capability has been observed in femoral hips by radiographs. The performance of this new anchor have been measured by tensile experiments and contrasted with finite element model. The results point out that keeping the fixation capacity, the new configuration presents advantages concerning to a minor damaged volume bone, a reduction of the manufacture cost and a simpler insertion.