Potential of P40 plastination for morphometric hip measurements.

Total hip replacement has become one of the most successful surgical operations over the past 25 years. The duration of a total hip prosthesis depends on primary stability, and many studies have tried precisely to evaluate hip joint morphology to obtain excellent contact between bone and prosthetic component. This study performed a morphometric analysis of the human hip joint using, for the first time, the P40 plastination procedure. We cut 42 hip joint compounds into slices 3 mm thick; for exact distance measuring the sections were scanned into the computer. The following mean measurements for hip geometry were obtained: vertical diameter of acetabulum 4.894+/-0.274 cm, depth of acetabulum 1.643+/-0.245 cm, femoral head radius 2.268+/-0.149 cm, femoral neck length 4.3670+/-0.528 cm, acetabular perimeter 6.711+/-0.434 cm, vertical diameter of labrum acetabulare 4.759+/-0.476 cm, depth of labrum acetabulare 2.599+/-0.395 cm, sum of femoral head and neck lengths 6.759+/-0.550 cm, hip axis length 11.859+/-1.007 cm, femoral neck axis length 10.12+/-0.555 cm, and femoral neck diameter 3.349+/-0.276 cm. All of these data reveal a significant gender difference. Our aim was to indicate an unconventional and new method of gaining morphometric hip data by using plastination.