Traditional methods of treatment for conditions such as arthritis of the knee involve physiotherapy and medication. However, when the condition becomes excessively painful for the patient, surgical intervention is undertaken. Movement of the natural knee joint involves the base of the femur bone articulating against the top of the tibia bone. The surfaces of these bones are covered by articular cartilage which allows smooth, pain free movement at the joint. The base of the femur and the top of the tibia have two surfaces or 'condyles'; in severe cases, the cartilage is worn away from both condyles, and they have to be replaced by a total knee arthroplasty (TKA). In some cases only one of the condyles is affected by arthritis, and yet both condyles are replaced in a TKA procedure. Unicondylar Knee Arthroplasty (UKA), which resurfaces only the affected side, is an alternative to TKA which is becoming an increasingly popular because of its improved functional outcome, favourable long term clinical results and the benefits of minimally invasive surgical techniques. In particular, UKA offers a more effective solution than TKA for more active patients with single compartment knee disease, because the mechanics of the knee are better preserved, and more functional anatomy is maintained. UKA also has advantage of rapid rehabilitation, short hospital stay, quicker operation and quicker recovery. Evidence suggests that revision of a UKA to a TKA results in performance similar to a primary TKA and has been reported to be an easier procedure than the typical revision TKA. However, despite this, UKA is still under-exploited as an alternative to TKA. This is partly related to perception issues, and partly to historically higher failure rates due to improper technique. Therefore, it is desirable to improve the understanding of how surgical technique impacts UKA performance and failure risks, to inform clinical decision-making for UKA with best-practice surgical technique. Most attempts to assess the performance of a joint replacement computationally have involved a 'deterministic' approach, that is, a single implant is modelled in a single bone and a single load is applied. This represents only one possible situation, when potentially many thousands could exist. Recently, there has been a move to replace deterministic approaches with statistical approaches, which attempt to take into account all sources of variability in the system. For example, the performance of an implant in a series of bones under varying loads can be analysed. In this project, statistical approaches will be applied to analyse the performance of UKA. The research will utilise a 'statistical knee joint' based on a large library of bone CT scans. This statistical knee joint represents a wide population of patients into which the unicondylar implant will be implanted. Variations in surgical technique will be accounted for by altering the nature of the surgical cuts and positions of the surrounding soft tissue structures. In this way, a knowledge of how the surgical technique can affect implant performance, in how quickly it wears and how likely it is to loosen, can be ascertained. This knowledge will be used to develop a tool that can be used to guide surgeons on what aspects of their surgical technique need careful consideration when planning their surgery in order to achieve improved patient outcomes. Industry can also benefit from the tool as part of the implant design process. The performance of new and existing implants can be robustly evaluated rapidly at the design stage, and the number of physical tests required can be reduced dramatically. In addition, designs that are predicted to perform poorly can be eliminated at an early stage, leading to substantial cost and time benefits for the design process. The commensurate benefit of this tool will be more robust implants with a longer lifespan, benefiting both the patient and the healthcare provider.

The Industrial Doctorate Centre in Molecular Modelling and Materials Science (M3S) at University College London (UCL) trains researchers in materials science and simulation of industrially important applications. As structural and physico-chemical processes at the molecular level largely determine the macroscopic properties of any material, quantitative research into this nano-scale behaviour is crucially important to the design and engineering of complex functional materials. The M3S IDC is a highly multi-disciplinary 4-year EngD programme, which works in partnership with a large base of industrial sponsors on a variety of projects ranging from catalysis to thin film technology, electronics, software engineering and bio-physics research. The four main research themes within the Centre are 1) Energy Materials and Catalysis; 2) Information Technology and Software Engineering; 3) Nano-engineering for Smart Materials; and 4) Pharmaceuticals and Bio-medical Engineering. These areas of research align perfectly with EPSRC's mission programmes: Energy, the Digital Economy, and Nanoscience through Engineering to Application. In addition, per definition an industrial doctorate centre is important to EPSRC's priority areas of Securing the Future Supply of People and Towards Better Exploitation. Students at the M3S IDC follow a tailor-made taught programme of specialist technical courses, as well as professionally accredited project management courses and transferable skills training, which ensures that whatever their first degree, on completion all students will have obtained thorough technical and managerial schooling as well as a doctoral research degree. The EngD research is industry-led and of comparable high quality and innovation as the more established PhD research degree. However, as the EngD students spend approximately 70% of their time on site with the industrial sponsor, they also gain first hand experience of the demanding research environment of a successful, competitive industry. Industrial partners who have taken up the opportunity during the first phase of the EngD programme to add an EngD researcher to their R&D teams include Johnson Matthey, Pilkington Glass, Exxon Mobil, Silicon Graphics, Accelrys and STS, while new companies are added to the pool of sponsors each year. Materials research in UCL is particularly well developed, with a thriving Centre for Materials Research and a newly established Materials Chemistry Centre. In addition, the Bloomsbury campus has perhaps the largest concentration of computational materials scientists in the UK, if not the world. Although affiliated to different UCL departments, all computational materials researchers are members of the UCL Materials Simulation Laboratory, which is active in advancing the development of common computational methodologies and encouraging collaborative research between the members. As such, UCL has a large team of well over a hundred research-active academic staff available to supervise research projects, ensuring that all industrial partners will be able to team up with an academic in a relevant research field to form the supervisory team to work with the EngD student. The success of the existing M3S Industrial Doctorate Centre and the obvious potential to widen its research remit and industrial partnerships into new, topical materials science areas, which are at the heart of EPSRC's strategic funding priorities for the near future, has led to this proposal for the funding of 5 annual cohorts of ten EngD students in the new phase of the Centre from 2009.