A Computational Approach to the Design of Scaffolds for Bone Tissue Engineering

Design of scaffolds for tissue engineering entails multi-disciplinary and multi-scale aspects. Since in vivo analysis of the tissue regeneration process is quite difficult in terms of selecting experimental protocols and requires considerable amount of time, a variety of numerical models have been developed to simulate mechanisms of tissue differentiation. The tremendous enhancement in computing power led researchers to develop more and more sophisticated models mostly based on finite element techniques and mechano-regulation computational models. In this article, we present an algorithm that combines the finite element model of an open-porous scaffold, a numerical optimization routine and a mechanobiological model. This algorithm has been utilized to determine both, the best scaffold geometry and the best load value (to apply on the scaffold) that allow the bone formation to be maximized.