Modeling and Reconstruction of Micro-structured 3D Chitosan/Gelatin Porous Scaffolds Using Micro-CT

摘要

Three dimensional (3D) channel networks are the key to promise the uniform distribution of nutrients inside3D hepatic tissue engineering scaffolds and prompt elimination of metabolic products out of the scaffolds. 3D chitosan/gelatin porous scaffolds with predefined internal channels were fabricated and a combination of light microscope, laserconfocal microscopy and micro-CT were employed to characterize the structure of porous scaffolds. In order to evaluatethe flow field distribution inside the micro-structured 3D scaffolds, a computer reconstructing method based on Micro-CT was proposed. According to this evaluating method, a contrast between 3D porous scaffolds with and withoutpredefined internal channels was also performed to assess scaffolds' fluid characters. Results showed that the internalchannel of the 3D scaffolds formed the 3D fluid channel network; the uniformity of flow field distribution of thescaffolds fabricated in this paper was better than the simple porous scaffold without micro-fluid channels.