Representation of porous artifacts for bio-medical applications

Abstract

Heterogeneous structures represent an important new frontier for 21st century engineering. For instance, a tissue engineered structure, such as bone scaffold for guided tissue regeneration, can be described as a heterogeneous structure consisting of 3D extra-cellular matrices (made from biodegradable material) and seeded donor cells and/or growth factors. The design and fabrication of such heterogeneous structures requires new techniques for solid models to represent 3D heterogeneous objects with complex material properties. This paper presents a representation of model density and porosity based on stochastic geometry. While density has been previously studied in the literature, porosity is a new problem for bio-medical CAD critical for modeling replacement bone tissues.