ACCURACY IMPROVEMENT FOR EVALUATING 3D SILK FIBROIN SCAFFOLD MICROARCHITECTURE USING MICROCOMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY

• Main Author: Anggita, Vashti
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/42442
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Performance of direct-dissolution salt-leached silk fibroin scaffold for tissue engineering is heavily influenced by its microarchitecture as it affects cell – scaffold interaction. It is very important to evaluate microarchitecture parameters, which are pore size, porosity, wall thickness, pore interconnectivity, and specific surface area, three dimensionally so that it is representative. Microarchitecture measurement has been done but with inaccurate method as the image resulting from Microcomputed Tomography (micro-CT) lacks contrast and the specimen evaluated was still too thin. This experiment was aimed to improve the accuracy of scaffold evaluation using micro-CT by determination of suitable threshold setting and the minimum specimen thickness of 3D evaluation of silk fibroin scaffold microarchitecture. Threshold was determined by comparing micro-CT images from scaffolds made with salt particles of size 158 ?m and 503 ?m to their respective scanning electron microscopy (SEM) results using ImageJ. Minimum specimen thickness was determined from the relationship between average pore sizes measured for every specimen thickness, evaluated using CTAn. These two parameters were then used to measure other scaffold microarchitecture parameters. From the experiment, the threshold was determined to be Threshold = (0.061 x salt particle size) – 4.62. Ratio of minimum specimen thickness to scaffold pore size used to evaluate scaffold is 6:1. Generally, it was found that increasing the scaffold specimen thickness increases average pore size measurement. By increasing threshold, increase happened in porosity and interconnectivity measurement while decrease happened in wall thickness and specific surface area measurement. Accuracy of microarchitecture measurement was improved for all parameters except for scaffold wall thickness.