The Bionic Design And Manufacture Of Tissue Engineering Scaffold

Today, tissue engineering is attempting to engineer virtually every human tissue. Design of porous scaffold and the manufacture technology are at the heart of bone tissue engineering research. Porous scaffolds are widely used in tissue engineering to provide a structural template for cell seeding and extracellular matrix formation. The scaffold of high porosity can cause or permit neighboring bone organization to grow. But the more porosity the scaffold is, the less intensity it has. To satisfy the mechanics demands, the normal porosity of scaffold is between 40%-55%.Traditional methods for design and manufacture of tissue engineering scaffold may lead to some disadvantages, such as single homogeneous material, simple structure, etc. In this paper, by analyzing the function and the structure of bone scaffolds, a new bionic design and manufacture method is expressed to meet the basic requirement of human bone. With the help of VC++6.0 and AutoCAD, three dimensional bone tissue engineering scaffolds is simulated in computer, and the scaffold is similar with the original and has the appropriate porosity. It provides theoretical bases for developing and exploiting bone tissue engineering scaffold.Firstly, the contour of the human bone image and a serial of edge contours in it are obtained after it is converted into certain format, adjusted and edged. After analyzing these edge contours with fractal theory, we obtain the fractal dimension of them and proved that these edge contours are self-similar. The edge contours are saved as vector image with B-spline, for the convenience of digital operation.Then three dimensional scaffold model is established. We compile a software of two dimensional scaffold bionic design based on the VC++ platform. The porosity is the most important character of scaffold, in order to obtain a suitable porosity, we use Monte-Carlo method to simulate the microstructure of human bone in a two dimensional area. Through the DXF file interface, the two dimensional scaffold model is transferred into AutoCAD. With the powerful function of three dimensional operation of AutoCAD, we extrude the scaffold model into three dimensional and combine these scaffold slices as a whole.Lastly we discusse the Rapid Prototyping technology of scaffold, it could easily make customized functional scaffolds with bioceramic.