Functionally heterogeneous porous scaffold design for tissue engineering

Most of the current tissue scaffolds are mainly designed with homogeneous porosity which does not represent the spatial heterogeneity found in actual tissues. Therefore engineering a realistic tissue scaffolds with properly graded properties to facilitate the mimicry of the complex elegance of native tissues are critical for the successful tissue regeneration. In this work, novel bio-mimetic heterogeneous porous scaffolds have been modeled. First, the geometry of the scaffold is extracted along with its internal regional heterogeneity. Then the model has been discretized with planner slices suitable for layer based fabrication. An optimum filament deposition angle has been determined for each slice based on the contour geometry and the internal heterogeneity. The internal region has been discritized considering the homogeneity factor along the deposition direction. Finally, an area weight based approach has been used to generate the spatial porosity function that determines the filament deposition location for desired biomimetic porosity. The proposed methodology has been implemented and illustrative examples are provided. The effective porosity has been compared between the proposed design and the conventional homogeneous scaffolds. The result shows a significant error reduction towards achieving the biomimetic porosity in the scaffold design and provides better control over the desired porosity level. Moreover, sample designed structures have also been fabricated with a NC motion controlled micro-nozzle biomaterial deposition system.