Software tools for tissue engineering
In the field of tissue engineering, porous structures take a prominent place. Researchers in this area want (1) to analyze porous structures found in nature and (2) to design their own porous structure, according to some criteria.
Software tools are essential for both analysis and design. What kind of ability should the ultimate analysis tool have? What should it be able to measure and how? How to display the results? And in terms of design, what parameters are needed? Which criteria to fullfill?
Looking forward to hear your thoughts!
Hello Erik,
Porous structures are determined, especially in medicine and medical technology in the future. As a bone substitute materials are tested with different structures microporosities here especially on the basis of absorbable materials like lactate compounds.
But the actual visualization of biological structures such as bone presents a challenge for the modeling; the following requirements are necessary:
1. Possibility of modifying a given basic geometric structures, determination of pore volume, composition of different zones with different architecture and pore volume as well as their transitions, input and consideration of load vectors
2. Analysis of existing porous structures with the determination of pore volume, 3D visualization, identification of vectors of trabecular structure, color coding of different zones, material assignment, transfer into CAD formats.
Hi Erik,
One of the major problems in tissue engineering is to keep cells alive deep inside the porous scaffold because they don't receive nutrients. I think imaging natural/synthetic porous materials can help understand / solve this problem by quantifying parameters such as flow paths (e.g. by centerline tracking), diameters of pore throats (i.e. transition between two pores), pore diameter, tortuosity ('straightness' of flow paths), degree of connectivity of pores with the outside. A more complicated analysis is image-based computational fluid dynamics, and powerful meshing software is required for this as porous structures are difficult to mesh.
Jorn