TY - JOUR A1 - Zehbe, R. A1 - Goebbels, Jürgen A1 - Ibold, Y. A1 - Gross, U. A1 - Schubert, H. T1 - Three-dimensional visualization of in vitro cultivated chondrocytes inside porous gelatine scaffolds: A tomographic approach JF - Acta biomaterialia N2 - Synchrotron radiation-based microcomputed tomography (SR-µCT) has become a valuable tool in the structural characterization of different types of materials, achieving volumetric details with micrometre resolution. Biomedical research dealing with porous polymeric biomaterials is one of the research fields which can benefit greatly from the use of SR-µCT. This study demonstrates that current experimental setups at synchrotron beamlines achieve a sufficiently high resolution in order to visualize the positions of individual cartilage cells cultivated on porous gelatine scaffolds made by a freeze-structuring technique. Depending on the processing parameters, the pore morphology of the scaffolds investigated was changed from large-pore sized but non-ordered structures to highly directional and fine pored. The cell-seeded scaffolds were stained with a combined Au/Ag stain to enhance the absorption contrast in SR-µCT. While only some cells showed enhanced absorption contrast, most cells did not show any difference in contrast to the surrounding scaffold and were consequently not detectable using conventional greyscale threshold methods. Therefore, using an image-based three-dimensional segmentation tool on the tomographic data revealed a multitude of non-stained cells. In addition, the SR-µCT data were compared with data obtained from scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and histology, while further linking the initial cell density measured via a MTT assay to the pore size as determined by SR-µCT. KW - Image analysis KW - Chondrocyte KW - Gelatine scaffold KW - Cartilage tissue engineering KW - Synchrotron radiation-based µCT PY - 2010 DO - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actbio.2009.11.020 SN - 1742-7061 VL - 6 IS - 6 SP - 2097 EP - 2107 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam AN - OPUS4-23944 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -