DEFORMATION MODELING OF SOFT TISSUE SCAFFOLDS FOR WOUND HEALING

摘要

Within tissue engineering (TE), one of the major research theme is on synthetic scaffold design. Most research emphasis on the material that has to be biocompatible and biodegradable over time and shows proper cell attachment properties. And traditional scaffold fabrication technique use chemical process resulting in uncontrolled porosity along the structure. Development of Solid Free Form (SFF) technique and improvement in some biomaterial properties provides the leverage of using these techniques to fabricate controlled and interconnected porous scaffold structure. These improved membrane/scaffolds are mostly regular porous structure and when applied in wound area various forces like bandage, contraction and self weight act upon that and cause deformation. As a result, the geometry and the designed porosity changes which eventually alters the desired choreographed functionality such as material concentration, design parameters, cytokines distribution over the wound device geometry. This balance often presents a tradeoff between a denser scaffold providing better mechanical function and a more porous scaffold providing better biofactor delivery, cell proliferation, pathways for nutrients and waste transportation. In this work, a novel scaffold modeling approach of "desired porosity with variational filament distance" has been proposed that will minimize the change in effective porosity with the designed porosity and thus will give a better functionality of such membrane providing both structural integrity and proper bioreactor environment. The proposed methodology has been implemented in this paper and illustrative examples are provided. Also a comparison result of measured effective porosity has been presented between proposed design model and conventional fixed filament distance scaffolds membrane.