Porous scaffold design using the distance field and triply periodic minimal surface models

An effective method for the 3D porous scaffold design of human tissue is presented based on a hybrid method of distance field and triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS). By the creative application of traditional distance field algorithm into the Boolean operations of the anatomical model and TPMS-based unit cell library, an almost defects free porous scaffolds having the complicated micro-structure and high quality external surface faithful to a specific anatomic model can be easily obtained without the difficult and time-consuming trimming and re-meshing processes. After generating the distance fields for the given tissue model and required internal micro-structure, a series of simple modifications in distance fields enable us to obtain a complex porous scaffold. Experimental results show that the proposed scaffold design method has the potential to combine the perfectly interconnected pore networks based on the TPMS unit cell libraries and the given external geometry in a consistent framework irrespective of the complexity of the models. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.