Guldberg's team has used micro-CT imaging to study fracture healing and repair of large bone defects that can result from the removal of bone tumors or crushing injuries. Large bone defects are typically repaired with allografts because large structural pieces are available from human donors.
But allografts are processed to avoid transmitting any diseases from the donor to the patient, leaving the bone sterile but dead. Allografts therefore lack living cells that could help the implants better integrate with existing bone. Consequently, they don't heal as well as autografts and can re-break in up to 30 percent of patients within a year. Live autograft bone integrates much better, but large amounts of bone are needed to repair a site. They are often too large to remove elsewhere in the patient's body and cause substantial additional pain.
Georgia Tech's micro-CT imaging facility has been used to study tissue engineering approaches to enhance or replace the use of bone grafts clinically. Guldberg and his collaborators at the University of Rochester, for example, have explored various strategies to revitalize dead allograft bone. Wrapping allografts with biomaterials containing living marrow cells or delivering bioactive genes has resulted in significantly accelerated repair and integration of allograft implants.
While a traditional bone scan can give a doctor some idea of a bone's density, a micro-CT scan that provides high resolution 3-D data on vascularization and mineralization can provide much more detailed information about the bone's structure and blood flow. Although not yet available clinically, these techniques give researchers an unprecedented depth of data on how a bone implant is integrating into the body.
In addition to studying bone regeneration, the ability to look at detailed 3-D images of vascular networks can shed light on
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Contact: Megan McRainey
megan.mcrainey@icpa.gatech.edu
Georgia Institute of Technology
20-Feb-2005