Abstract

GONZALEZ, M.A. et al. Morphological quantification of polymer nanofibers in tissue engineering images. Lat. Am. appl. res. [online]. 2012, vol.42, n.1, pp.89-95. ISSN 0327-0793.

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 matrices with particular morphologies that promote a specific biological response for each type of cell, is strongly needed. To attain this goal, the characterization and quantification of the morphological properties of the scaffolds are necessary to correlate them to mechanical and biological properties. In this work, micro/nanofibrous scaffolds obtained by electrospinning were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The use of the granulometric size function, computed from the scaffold images, to develop algorithms that help the specialists 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 specialists in this research area.

Keywords : Digital Image Processing; Mathematical Morphology; Tissue Engineering; Biomedical Polymers.

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