Metal emissions from traffic pollution as a risk factor for osteoporosis

The overall aim of my PhD is to identify the mechanisms linking exogenous heavy metals from traffic-related air pollution to the predisposition to osteoporotic fragility fractures. This thesis has two main objectives: first, to develop and perform analyses on in vitro micro-CT images of bone fragments exposed to particulate pollution in a bioreactor to better inform the
biological mechanisms that can be used to develop improved algorithms of the remodelling process. The second aim is to use the algorithm to develop a physiological finite element (FE)
simulation of a long-time span of the same bones inside the bioreactor in order to determine what the long-term effects of exposure would have been.