Design and Fabrication of Customised Scaffold for Femur Bone Using 3D Printing

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing is a promising field for making three dimensional scaffolds in which parts are fabricated directly from the 3D CAD model. This paper presents, the patients CT scan data of femur bone in DICOM format is exported into MIMICS software to stack 2D scan data into 3D model. Four layers of femur bone were selected for creation of customised femur bone scaffold. Unit cell designs such as double bend curve, S bend curve, U bend curve and steps were designed using SOLIDWORKS software. Basic primitives namely square, hexagon and octagon primitives of pore size 0.6mm, 0.7 mm and 0.8 mm diameter and inter distance 0.7mm, 0.8mm and 0.9 mm are used to design the scaffold structures. In 3matic software, patterns were developed by using the above four unit cells. Then, the four layers of bone and patterns were imported into 3matic to create customised bone scaffolds. The porosities of customised femur bone scaffold were determined using the MIMICS software. It was found that the customised femur bone scaffolds for the unit cell design of U bend curve with square primitives of pore size 0.8mm diameter and inter distance 0.7mm gives higher porosity of 56.58 % compared to other scaffolds. The models were then fabricated using 3D printing technique.