Abstract
Hybrid 3D scaffolds composed of different biomaterials with fibrous structure or enriched with different inclusions (i.e., nano- and microparticles) have already demonstrated their positive effect on cell integration and regeneration. The analysis of fibers in hybrid biomaterials, especially in a 3D space is often difficult due to their various diameters (from micro to nanoscale) and compositions. Though biomaterials processing workflows are implemented, there are no software tools for fiber analysis that can be easily integrated into such workflows. Due to the demand for reproducible science with Jupyter notebooks and the broad use of the Python programming language, we have developed the new Python package quanfima offering a complete analysis of hybrid biomaterials, that include the determination of fiber orientation, fiber and/or particle diameter and porosity. Here, we evaluate the provided tensor-based approach on a range of generated datasets under various noise conditions. Also, we show its application to the X-ray tomography datasets of polycaprolactone fibrous scaffolds pure and containing silicate-substituted hydroxyapatite microparticles, hydrogels enriched with bioglass contained strontium and alpha-tricalcium phosphate microparticles for bone tissue engineering and porous cryogel 3D scaffold for pancreatic cell culturing. The results obtained with the help of the developed package demonstrated high accuracy and performance of orientation, fibers and microparticles diameter and porosity analysis.
Highlights
Biomaterials are often designed to mimic chemical and physical properties, for instance shape, of biological systems [1,2,3]
FiberScout was developed for analysis of industrial computed tomography (CT) datasets of fiber-reinforced materials [63]
It provides a wide range of features, which includes displaying a distribution of fiber lengths and orientation to clustering fibers with equivalent properties and selection of individual fibers by certain criteria
Summary
Biomaterials are often designed to mimic chemical and physical properties, for instance shape, of biological systems [1,2,3]. The development of special fibrous and porous three-dimensional (3D) structures, so-called scaffolds, has gained popularity in the field of tissue engineering (TE) [4,5,6]. Such structures can replace and treat damaged body tissues[5]. The research was conducted at Tomsk Polytechnic University within the framework of a Tomsk Polytechnic University Competitiveness Enhancement Program grant (scaffolds fabrication via electrospinning technique). There was no additional external funding received for this study
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