A Porous Scaffold Design Method for Bone Tissue Engineering Using Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces

Abstract

Among the various scaffold design methods, function-based modeling is of great interest due to its accurate controllability for designing pore architectures. Parameters, such as the pore size, pore shape, porosity, and channel interconnectivity, should be designed according to actual skeleton characteristics. To this, an effective modeling method of trabecular bone is proposed, combining triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) and fractal geometry. First, the surface morphology of real trabecular bone is obtained based on the binary processing of computed tomography images. Then, the fractal pore-making element using TPMS is built and constructed into a complex porous structure. Finally, the customized scaffold model is manufactured with an additive manufacturing method.

Keywords

• Bone tissue
• TPMS
• porous scaffold
• 3D printing