Abstract:

Tissue engineering (TE) emerged more than three decades ago. It holds the promise to solve many difficult medical problems that current treatments cannot deal with or cannot achieve satisfactory clinical outcomes. For regenerating human body tissues, there are different TE strategies, including scaffold-, growth factor- or cell-based TE. TE scaffolds should possess various properties, such as integrated and strong structures, interconnected networks with suitable pores, and proper biological activities. Conventional fabrication methods for TE scaffolds include gas forming, solvent casting/particle leaching, freeze drying, electrospinning, etc. but they cannot produce advanced TE scaffolds with the integration of these required properties. 3D printing provides a promising way to fabricate multifunctional scaffolds through layer-by-layer deposition of the printing materials using computer-aided-design (CAD) structures. In recent years, many studies have investigated the properties of TE scaffolds though computational methods. Computational simulation of TE scaffolds can shorten the time and reduce the costs for developing desired scaffolds. In this seminar, a review on the research in computer-aided design, computational simulation and 3D printing will be given, and our work in this area will be introduced and discussed.