Abstract
Customized porous structures are widely used in bone tissue engineering as bone substitutes. In natural bone, the bone tissue relies on blood vessels in vesicular structure for nutrition supply. When a defect appears, the biomimetic porous scaffold becomes a good candidate for new blood vessels formation and helps the bone tissue ingrowth. To construct an osteoconductive bone scaffold that is suitable for the defect region, the powder-based 3D printing technology holds great promise since they can deal with biocompatible and biodegradable materials. In this mini review, we introduce several types of powder-based manufacturing technologies and their corresponding printable materials for the construction of porous structures. Besides some research cases are highlighted to illustrate the recent development of some research directions related to the bone scaffold for bone tissue regeneration.
Highlights
The three-dimensional (3D) porous structure has always received considerable attention in different fields, such as materials science and bone tissue engineering, due to its ability to enhance the mechanical properties as well as its excellent biomimetic design as bone scaffolds
The advancement of 3D printing technology enables the fabrication of complex porous scaffolds for bone tissue regeneration
The porosity and pore size of the bone scaffolds are of great importance for the cell seeding process, which should be carefully designed and tested both in vitro and in vivo experiments
Summary
The three-dimensional (3D) porous structure has always received considerable attention in different fields, such as materials science and bone tissue engineering, due to its ability to enhance the mechanical properties as well as its excellent biomimetic design as bone scaffolds. When used as an implanted bone scaffold, a porous shape similar to the natural bone with a porosity of 50–90 vol% makes it a good candidate for mechanically supporting cell growth and inducing angiogenesis (Peltola et al, 2008; Senatov et al, 2016) This small inner structure with complex geometry could not be realized by traditional manufacturing processes, such as computer numerical control (CNC) machining, before the development of neoteric 3D printing technology. 3D printed scaffolds are mostly fabricated by powder-based 3D printing techniques, such as selective laser sintering (SLS), selective laser melting (SLM), and binder inkjet printing (BIP) These three printing methods have some similarities, such as using a roller to roll the powder from the powder supply platform to the fabrication platform and forming the structure layer by layer from bottom to top; different methods are used to construct each layer. As mentioned in printing technology, this material is mostly used together with a phosphoric acid-based
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