Bio-Inspired Design of a Porous Resorbable Scaffold for Bone Reconstruction: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

The study and imitation of the biological and mechanical systems present in nature and living beings always have been sources of inspiration for improving existent technologies and establishing new ones. Pursuing this line of thought, we consider an artificial graft typical in the bone reconstruction surgery with the same microstructure of the bone living tissue and examine the interaction between these two phases, namely bone and the graft material. Specifically, a visco-poroelastic second gradient model is adopted for the bone-graft composite system to describe it at a macroscopic level of observation. The second gradient formulation is employed to consider possibly size effects and as a macroscopic source of interstitial fluid flow, which is usually regarded as a key factor in bone remodeling. With the help of the proposed formulation and via a simple example, we show that the model can be used as a graft design tool. As a matter of fact, an optimization of the characteristics of the implant can be carried out by numerical investigations. In this paper, we observe that the size of the graft considerably influences the interaction between bone tissue and artificial bio-resorbable material and the possibility that the bone tissue might substitute more or less partially the foreign graft for better bone healing.

A multiscale optimisation method for bone growth scaffolds based on triply periodic minimal surfaces

“…The Lidinoid scaffold type not only yielded the maximum cell growth for its optimal volume fraction but also for the entire range of volume fractions. A recent study (Scerrato et al 2021) presents a useful tool for understanding the interaction between bone and a bio-resorbable scaffold based on a viscoporoelastic model. While some numerical investigation is also done, the study does not propose a method to optimise the design parameters as we do here.…”

“…A recent study (Scerrato et al. 2021 ) presents a useful tool for understanding the interaction between bone and a bio-resorbable scaffold based on a viscoporoelastic model. While some numerical investigation is also done, the study does not propose a method to optimise the design parameters as we do here.…”

Mechanical analysis of heterogeneous materials with higher-order parameters

“…Complex multiscale structures are typically designed by setting a lattice of porous material [52,63,64,77], where complexity of such structures and effects of local microstructure are best described by incorporating highergradient effects. This can be observed in biological materials [39,44,57,83] that are highly heterogeneous (e.g. bone tissue) and have hierarchical structures that demand highergradient effects to be included in modeling their mechanical responses [40,42] as well as in their multi-physics simulations [39,62].…”

Biomimetic Membranes without Proteins but with Aqueous Nanochannels and Facilitated Transport. Minireview

“…Finally, we should mention that the imitation of biological membranes and aqueous channels attracts more and more attention. See, for example, recent reviews which give a broader view of mimicking biological membranes [ 92 , 93 ], bioinspired nanochannels [ 94 , 95 ] and their possible applications as sensors [ 96 ], separation, and purification, including desalination [ 97 – 99 ]. We hope that nitrocellulose-based biomimetic membranes will find a proper place in this research and its applications.…”