Osteoblast Ingrowth into Titanium Scaffolds Made by Electron Beam Melting

Abstract

Present paper describes early findings from the study of Ti-6Al-4V scaffolds additively manufactured using electron beam melting (EBM®) technology and the influence of surface topography on the initial stages of cell acceptance. The surface topography of the components made by additive manufacturing (AM) processes including EBM® are often hard to control within the desired feature size range without post-processing. Two groups of experiments studying the behavior of human osteoblast-like cells (MG63) on samples with different surface roughness were carried out in vitro: Ti-6Al-4V samples only powder-blasted, and Ti-6Al-4V samples additionally electrochemically polished. The cell migration into powder-blasted Ti-6Al-4V 3D scaffolds with different shapes and dimensions of the lattice structures were studied.