The feasibility of atomic force microscopy as a cytodetachment technique to quantify osteoblastic adhesion with implant surfaces

The preliminary data acquired for the roughness parameter (Ra) demonstrate that there is a clear difference between the 4 different surface preparations studied. Based on previous work it can be expected that once each sample has been seeded with cells, there will exist strong variations among the cellular activity on each disk surface. While it is not the goal of this project to quantify differences among the levels of cellular activity, it is believed that they can be inferred from differences in adhesive strength as well as visual differences among the images produced by the AFM. It is expected that differences in extracellular matrix production will be chiefly responsible for not only differences in cellular phenotypes among samples but also differences in adhesive strengths.