Bone stress adaptation models.

The basic concepts employed in formulating models of the process of stress adaptation in living bone tissue are reviewed. A purpose of this review is to define and separate issues in the formulation of bone remodeling theories. After discussing the rationale and objective of these models, the concepts and techniques involved in the modeling process are reviewed one by one. It is concluded that some techniques will be more successful than others in achieving the goals of computational bone remodeling. In particular, rationale is given for the preference of surface bone remodeling approaches over internal bone remodeling approaches, and for interactive multi-scale level, rather than mono-scale level, computational strategies.