Multicriteria Decision Analysis in Improving Quality of Design in Femoral Component of Knee Prostheses: Influence of Interface Geometry and Material

Knee prostheses as medical products require careful application of quality and design tool to ensure the best performance. Therefore, quality function deployment (QFD) was proposed as a quality tool to systematically integrate consumer's expectation to perceived needs by medical and design team and to explicitly address the translation of customer needs into engineering characteristics. In this study, full factorial design of experiment (DOE) method was accompanied by finite element analysis (FEA) to evaluate the effect of inner contours of femoral component on mechanical stability of the implant and biomechanical stresses within the implant components and adjacent bone areas with preservation of the outer contours for standard Co-Cr alloy and a promising functionally graded material (FGM). The ANOVA revealed that the inner shape of femoral component influenced the performance measures in which the angle between the distal and anterior cuts and the angle between the distal and posterior cuts were greatly influential. In the final ranking of alternatives, using multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), the designs with FGM was ranked first over the Co-Cr femoral component, but the original design with Co-Cr material was not the best choice femoral component, among the top ranked design with the same material.