Characterization of Additive Manufactured Scaffolds

At the increasing pace with which additive manufacturing technologies are advancing, it is possible nowadays to fabricate a variety of three-dimensional (3D) scaffolds with controlled structural and architectural properties. Examples span from metal cellular solids, which find application as prosthetic devices, to bioprinted constructs holding the promise to regenerate tissues and organs. These 3D porous constructs can display a variety of physicochemical and mechanical properties depending on the used material and on the design of the pore network to be created. To determine how these properties change with changing the scaffold’s design criteria, a plethora of characterization methods are applied in the biofabrication field. In this chapter, we review the most common techniques used to characterize such fabricated scaffolds by additive manufacturing technologies.