3D Micro-Tomographic imaging and Quantitative Morphometry for the Nondestructive Evaluation of Porous Biomaterials

Micro-computed tomography (µCT) is a new and emerging technique for the nondestructive assessment and analysis of the three-dimensional trabecular bone architecture. The applications of µCT with respect to the analysis of bone are manyfold. Nevertheless, it also holds high promise for the microstructural measurement and analysis of porous biomaterials. For the purpose of the study, a desk-top µCT providing a nominal isotropie resolution of 14 µm was used. Since the polymeric material has a very low X-ray absorption coefficient, the scaffolds were stained prior to measurement using a commercial X-ray contrast agent. This allowed not only to acquire important microstructural features of the diree-dimensional scaffold but also to compute standard structural indices such as BV/TV, BS/BV, Tb.N, Tb.Th, Tb.Sp and the degree of anisotropy (DA) using mean intercept length measurements. The preliminary results show that different types of scaffolds can be distinguished both qualitatively (visualization) and quantitatively (morphometry) provided an adequate X-ray staining technique is used. It can be concluded that, in the future, µCT may be of considerable help in basic as well as in applied research and development.