A computer simulation study of cell seeding of a porous biomaterial

Tissue engineering is a part of regenerative medicine that handles in vitro creation of biological tissue substitutes which may repair or substitute injured or diseased parts of the body. In order to create tissue structures, biocompatible materials with a porous structure (scaffolds) are used as support for cells. The paper presents the stages of development and the software application that results, used as support for the study of cell seeding of a three-dimensional scaffold. The application uses an algorithm based on the Metropolis Monte Carlo method. The program was developed by using the Visual Basic.Net programming environment. Ideally, cell seeding should be fast and should achieve an uniform distribution of the cell population in the scaffold. In a first stage, the program creates the initial configuration of the system consisting of a cell suspension placed in the neighborhood of a scaffold immersed in cell culture medium. Starting from this configuration, using our software application the movement of the cells in suspension is studied as well as their potential of getting attached to the biomaterial.