A mathematical approach to bone tissue engineering

Abstract

Tissue engineering is becoming consolidated in the biomedical field as one of the most promising strategies in tissue repair and regenerative medicine. Within this discipline, bone tissue engineering involves the use of cell-loaded porous biomaterials, i.e. bioscaffolds, to promote bone tissue regeneration in bone defects or diseases such as osteoporosis, although it has not yet been incorporated into daily clinical practice. The overall success of a particular bone tissue engineering application depends strongly on scaffold design parameters, which do away with long and expensive clinical protocols. Computer simulation is a useful tool that may reduce animal experiments and help to identify optimal patient-specific designs after concise model validation. In this paper, we present a novel mathematical approach to bone regeneration within scaffolds, based on a multiscale framework. Results are presented over an actual scaffold microstructure, showing the potential of computer simulation, and how it can aid in the task of making bone tissue engineering a reality in clinical practice.

Scaffold microarchitecture determines internal bone directional growth structure: A numerical study

“…1. Next, the main aspects of this approach are described, while a more detailed description may be found in Sanz-Herrera et al (2008c) and Sanz-Herrera et al (2009b). Briefly, we distinguish two macroscopic regions: first the bone organ domain O 0 ÀS which is treated as purely macroscopic through a standard bone remodelling theory (Jacobs, 1994) and, second, the scaffold subdomain O 0 S , where its macroscopic behaviour is given (in terms of apparent mechanical properties and permeability) from the microscopic scale posed at the pore level.…”

Applications of Computational Modelling and Simulation of Porous Medium in Tissue Engineering

“…Homogenous scaffolds or scaffolds of constant porosity are a common assumption employed in tissue engineering simulations. Many reports confirm that this to be a good assumption and useful in calculating scaffold permeability [25,26]. However, many issues arise when considering uniform scaffold permeability.…”

Modelling bioactivity and degradation of bioactive glass based tissue engineering scaffolds

“…to dissolution and new layer formation, i.e., bioactivity, the Voxel-FEM method is used (see Sanz-Herrera et al, 2008c;Sanz-Herrera et al, 2009b). The discretized problem and the numerical algorithms are implemented using the program Abaqus (Hibbit et al, 2001).…”