A computational and experimental framework for tissue engineering scaffold design and characterisation

机械生物学研究是为了了解力学在细胞生理学和病理学中的作用。它将对研究细胞生理学和病理学产生影响，并指导组织（如骨/软骨）的结构和功能特征的再生策略。在体外机械生物学研究中，通常通过生物反应器将动态微机械环境施加于细胞。多孔支架通常用于在三维（3D）培养环境中容纳细胞。这种支架通常具有不同的孔几何形状（例如具有不同的孔形状、孔尺寸和孔隙率）。这些孔的几何形状可以影响细胞在装载到生物反应器中时所经历的内部微机械环境。因此，为了调整细胞上施加的微机械环境，研究人员可以调整施加的载荷和/或支架孔几何形状的设计。通过优化支架内细胞的机械刺激，使组织工程/类器官领域的细胞机械生物学研究受益，该博士项目旨在开发一个计算和实验框架，用于设计组织工程支架几何形状并表征其对内部微机械环境的影响。为了进行博士项目，计算机辅助设计/计算机辅助工程（CAD/CAE）方法将用于创建支架几何形状和模拟内部微机械环境。此外，将设置实验测量，例如通过测量支架内的流动来验证模拟结果。之后，许多模拟将在各种支架几何形状上运行，以创建“大数据”。最后，数据驱动的优化技术将用于处理“大数据”，以建立自动设计框架。该框架有望应用于各种组织工程应用（如骨、软骨）的支架几何设计。

Mechanobiology research is for understanding the role of mechanics in cell physiology and pathology. It will have implications for studying cellular physiology and pathology and to guide the strategy for regenerating both the structural and functional features of tissue (such as bone / cartilage). In mechanobiological studies in vitro, a dynamic micro-mechanical environment is usually applied to cells via bioreactors. Porous scaffolds are commonly used for housing the cells in a three-dimensional (3D) culturing environment. Such scaffolds usually have different pore geometries (e.g. with different pore shapes, pore dimensions and porosities). These pore geometries can affect the internal micro-mechanical environment that the cells experience when loaded in the bioreactor. Therefore, to adjust the applied micro-mechanical environment on cells, researchers can tune either the applied load and/or the design of the scaffold pore geometries. To benefit the tissue engineering / organoids fields for cellular mechanobiology research by optimising the mechanical stimulation on cells within scaffolds, this PhD project aims to develop a computational and experimental framework for designing tissue engineering scaffold geometry and characterising its influence on the internal micro-mechanical environment. To carry out the PhD project, computer-aided design / computer-aided engineering (CAD/CAE) approach will be used for creating scaffold geometries and simulating the internal micro-mechanical environment. In addition, experimental measurement will be setup for validating the simulation results by measuring the flow within scaffolds, for example. Afterwards, many simulations will be run on various scaffold geometries to create a "big data". Finally, a data-driven optimisation technique will be used for processing the "big data" to build up a automatic design framework. This framework is expected to be applied to scaffold geometric design for various tissue engineering applications (e.g. bone, cartilage).