Conformal Tissue Scaffold with Multi-functional Porosity for Wound Healing

In tissue engineering and wound healing, porous scaffolds can stimulate the wound healing process by regenerating the damaged or diseased tissue. But when applied in wound area various forces like bandage, contraction and self weight act upon these visco-elastic scaffold/membrane and cause deformation. As a result, the geometry and the designed porosity change which eventually alters the desired choreographed functionality such as material concentration, design parameters, cytokines distribution over the wound device geometry. In this work, a novel scaffold modelling approach has been proposed that will minimize the change in effective porosity with the designed porosity due to its deformation. First the targeted wound surface model has been extracted and sliced along its depth. Then the height based contours are projected and descritized into functional regions Surface profile for each region have been extracted with contour area weight based slope method. Finally, the filament deposition locations have been generated considering the region profile. Thus the proposed method will give a better functionality of tissue membrane providing predictable material concentration along the wound surface and optimum environment under deformed conditions. The methodology has been implemented using a bi-layer porous membrane via computer simulation. A comparison of the results of effective porosity between the proposed design and conventional design has also been provided. The result shows a significant improvement and control over desired porosity with the proposed method.