Micro-CT - A Digital 3D Microstructural Voyage into Scaffolds: A Systematic Review of the Reported Methods and Results

Background: Cell behavior is the key to tissue regeneration. Given the fact that most of the cells used in tissue engineering are anchorage-dependent, their behavior including adhesion, growth, migration, matrix synthesis, and differentiation is related to the design of the scaffolds. Thus, characterization of the scaffolds is highly required. Micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) provides a powerful platform to analyze, visualize, and explore any portion of interest in the scaffold in a 3D fashion without cutting or destroying it with the benefit of almost no sample preparation need. Main body: This review highlights the relationship between the scaffold microstructure and cell behavior, and provides the basics of the micro-CT method. In this work, we also analyzed the original papers that were published in 2016 through a systematic search to address the need for specific improvements in the methods section of the papers including the amount of provided information from the obtained results.FROnTHERA Project (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000023) within the Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020) under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through ERDF, and Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (SFRH/BD/99555/2014, IF/00423/2012, and IF/01285/2015).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio