Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University, Nakhon Pathom, Thailand.
Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University, Nakhon Pathom, Thailand.
Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 2021 Jun;205:106088. doi: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2021.106088. Epub 2021 Apr 6.
The triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) method effectively mimics the porous scaffold for tissue engineering with continuous topology, pore interconnections, and high surface area to volume ratio. However, the process to generate a three-dimensional (3D) mesh of porous structure from the mimicked organs is complicated for biologists and sometimes requires various software. Herein, we present the standalone program called "Scaffolder" for generating the porous topology from the user-input 3D model to the open-source community.
The 3D mesh of a porous scaffold was used by the proposed method and dual-marching cubes algorithm. Afterward, the mesh was sliced into the contours to examine pore sizes by Feret diameter and Gilbert-Johnson-Keerthi distance. The relationships between the program parameters (i.e., grid size, angular frequency, and iso-level) and scaffold properties (i.e., pore size, porosity, and surface area ratio) were investigated.
The developed program can generate and evaluate a porous scaffold. The median (IQR) absolute errors in grid size of 200, 300, 400, and 500 divisions were 1.92 (0.35-3.80), 1.00 (0.18-2.22), 0.53 (0-1.37), and 0.24 (0-0.74), respectively. Spearman's correlation showed the impact of angular frequency and iso-level on the pore size, porosity, and surface area of the generated scaffold (p<0.05).
This study enables researchers to rapidly design the 3D mesh of porous scaffold design, evaluate scaffold properties, and customize the implicit function for various applications, especially in tissue engineering and computational structural analysis.
三重周期性极小曲面（TPMS）方法能够有效地模拟具有连续拓扑结构、孔连通性和高表面积与体积比的组织工程多孔支架。然而，从模拟器官生成三维（3D）多孔结构网格的过程对于生物学家来说较为复杂，有时需要使用各种软件。在此，我们向开源社区介绍一个名为“Scaffolder”的独立程序，用于从用户输入的 3D 模型生成多孔拓扑结构。
该方法和对偶推进立方体算法用于生成多孔支架的 3D 网格。然后，通过菲雷特直径和吉尔伯特-约翰逊-克里蒂距离将网格切片成轮廓，以检查孔径。研究了程序参数（即网格大小、角频率和等位面）与支架特性（即孔径、孔隙率和表面积比）之间的关系。
所开发的程序可用于生成和评估多孔支架。200、300、400 和 500 个分区的网格尺寸中位数（IQR 绝对误差）分别为 1.92（0.35-3.80）、1.00（0.18-2.22）、0.53（0-1.37）和 0.24（0-0.74）。Spearman 相关性表明角频率和等位面对生成支架的孔径、孔隙率和表面积有影响（p<0.05）。
本研究使研究人员能够快速设计 3D 多孔支架模型，评估支架特性，并针对各种应用定制隐式函数，特别是在组织工程和计算结构分析中。
