Author(s)

Xing Zhang, Er-Ping Luo, Guang-Hao Shen, Kang-Ning Xie, Tian-Yi Song, Xiao-Ming Wu, Wen-Ke Gan, Yi-Li Yan

Department of Military Medical Equipment & Metrology, Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, the Fourth Military Medical Univer-sity, Xi’an, China..

Purpose: The objective of this research is to investigate whether bioimpedance is useful to indicate a shank’s physical condition during training. Methods: Bioimpedance was applied to monitor the condition of 8 rabbits’ shanks in 3 weeks, during which the rabbits were trained for regular excessive jump daily. Nine tibias in 16 developed stress fracture after the 3-week training. Results: According to the analysis of the bioimpedance data, we found that changing pattern of bioimpedance properties of shanks which were more liable to suffer from SF was different from that of shanks which were not during training. Conclusions: This suggests that bioimpedance may be used to monitor the physical condition of a limb, imply its liability to develop stress fracture, and indicate stress fracture during training.

Bioimpedance Measurements; Stress Fracture; Bioimpedance Monitoring

Zhang, X. , Luo, E. , Shen, G. , Xie, K. , Song, T. , Wu, X. , Gan, W. and Yan, Y. (2009) Multi-frequency bioimpedance measurements of rabbit shanks with stress fracture. Journal of Biomedical Science and Engineering, 2, 166-172. doi: 10.4236/jbise.2009.23028.