Synchrotron imaging techniques for bone and cartilage tissue engineering: potential, current trends, and future directions.

Biomedical imaging is crucial to the success of bone/cartilage tissue engineering (TE) by providing detailed three-dimensional information on tissue-engineered scaffolds and associated bone/cartilage growth during the healing process. Synchrotron radiation (SR)-based biomedical imaging is an emerging technique for this purpose that has been drawing considerable recent attention. Due to the unique properties of synchrotron light, SR biomedical imaging can provide information that conventional X-ray imaging is not able to capture. SR biomedical imaging techniques notably differ from conventional imaging in both physics and implementation, thus varying with regard to both capability and popularity for biomedical imaging applications. In the earlier decade, synchrotron-based imaging was used in bone/cartilage TE to characterize bone/cartilage scaffolds and tissues as well as the varying degrees of success in reconstruction. However, several key issues should be addressed through research before SR biomedical imaging can be advanced to a noninvasive method for application to live animals and eventually to human patients. This review briefly presents recent developments in this area, focusing on different synchrotron-based biomedical imaging techniques and their advantages and limitations, as well as reported applications to bone and cartilage TE. Key issues and challenges are also identified and discussed along with recommendations for future research.