Design Method of Porous Scaffold Using Computational Simulation for Bone Regeneration

Abstract

In bone tissue engineering, a porous scaffold plays an important role as a functional substitute to provide a mechanical load-bearing construct and to direct new bone formation. Bone regeneration process consists of scaffold degradation and bone formation, in which scaffold-bone construct needs to keep a desired mechanical function with well-organized functional transition between two components. Therefore, a design of biodegradable porous scaffold needs to be evaluated based on functional change of the structure in bone regeneration process. In this study, a framework to design a porous scaffold is proposed using a computational simulation for bone regeneration. First, rate equations for scaffold degradation and new bone formation were proposed, and computational simulations for bone regeneration was conducted using a simple scaffold stucture. As a result, it was demonstrated that the proposed simulation method could express the bone regeneration process in which new bone formed with increasing mechanical function while scaffold degraded with decreasing its load-bearing function. Second, a new design method for porous scaffold structure using a bone regeneration simulation was proposed. As a design objective function, difference in strain energy between bone-scaffold construct and ideal bone in regeneration process was used, and optimum design valuable that minimize the objective function was searched by simulating bone regeneration process. Through these simulation studies, the proposed method is expected to have a potential for the actual porous scaffold design.