Development of porous medical implant scaffolds via laser additive manufacturing

The objective was to develop and evaluate the porous medical implant scaffolds designed via digital method and fabricated by laser additive manufacturing. A porous artificial femur model and several vessel scaffolds with customized design were created based on the widely used computed tomography (CT) technology and Pro/Engineer software, and then were obtained by selective laser melting of powdered titanium-alloy material. The fabricating results show that supports are not required with the improvement of the processability of lattice, and porous scaffolds with good interconnectivity can be fabricated. Some issues also appear, such as the low geometric accuracy of lattices. The exploited design freedom is an expected benefit in medical field due to the individual characteristic of each patient. It is expected that more scaffolds will be developed and applied in practical fields with further study on design, process and biocompatibility.