I sat in on the presentation by Dana Coombs of Synthes yesterday as he talked about his fascinating work in characterizing the human lumbar spine using Abaqus FEA for the purpose of evaluating implant designs.  It took a few minutes, but I eventually got used to terms like "cadaverous" as he spoke about the physical testing that he was conducting in conjunction with the FEA studies.  The work was very interesting and showed great range in going from CAT scans to FEA meshes to complex Abaqus Explicit analyses, the whole time corroborating each step of the process with actual physical tests on that  "cadaverous" (shudder) spine, which he admitted "was pretty much toast" by the time he got through with it.  He also explored multi-scale aspects of simulation by going from continuum models to connectors for ligaments and bushing connectors for discs.  The result was a highly characterized model of a human spine that his company can use to design their spinal implants, so that the implant behavior matches natural biological behavior as much as possible - or desired.