Raman spectroscopic study of the repair of surgical bone defects grafted or not with biphasic synthetic micro-granular HA + β-calcium triphosphate irradiated or not with λ850 nm LED light.

The handling of bone losses due to different etiologic factors is difficult and many techniques are aim to improve repair, including a wide range of biomaterials and, recently, photobioengineering. This work aimed to assess, through Raman spectroscopy, the level of bone mineralization using the intensities of the Raman peaks of both inorganic (~960, ~1,070, and 1,077 cm(-1)) and organic (~1,454 and ~1,666 cm(-1)) contents of bone tissue. Forty rats were divided into four groups each subdivided into two subgroups according to the time of sacrifice (15 and 30 days). Surgical bone defects were made on the femur of each animal with a trephine drill. On animals of group clot, the defect was filled only by blood clot, on group LED, the defect filled with the clot was further irradiated. On animals of groups biomaterial and LED + biomaterial, the defect was filled by biomaterial and the last one was further irradiated (λ850 ± 10 nm, 150 mW, Φ ~ 0.5 cm(2), 20 J/cm(2)-session, 140 J/cm(2)-treatment) at 48-h intervals and repeated for 2 weeks. At both 15th and 30th days following sacrifice, samples were taken and analyzed by Raman spectroscopy. At the end of the experimental time, the intensity of hydroxyapatite (HA) (~960 cm(-1)) were higher on group LED + biomaterial and the peaks of both organic content (~1,454 and ~1,666 cm(-1)) and transitional HA (~1,070 and ~1,077 cm(-1)) were lower on the same group. It is concluded that the use of LED phototherapy associated to biomaterial was effective in improving bone healing on bone defects as a result of the increasing deposition of HA measured by Raman spectroscopy.