Morphological quantification of polimer nanofibers in tissue engineering images

Abstract

The design and fabrication of highly porous polymeric or composite scaffolds for tissue engineering and organ regeneration are keystones to advance in these interdisciplinary research areas. The development of biocompatible polymeric ma-trices with particular morphologies that promote a specific biological response for each type of cell, is strongly needed. To attain this goal, the characteri-zation and quantification of the morphological prop-erties of the scaffolds are necessary to correlate them to mechanical and biological properties.In this work, micro/nanofibrous scaffolds ob-tained by electrospinning were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The use of the granulometric size function, computed from the scaf-fold images, to develop algorithms that help the spe-cialists in the characterization of the shape, size, stocking density and orientation of the arrays, is proposed. The obtained results show that the analysis of SEM images allows for a good characterization of fibrous scaffolds becoming a useful tool for spe-cialists in this research area.