[The application and advancement of rapid prototyping technology in bone tissue engineering]

In bone tissue engineering, a highly porous artificial extracellular matrix or scaffold is essential to the attachment, proliferation and differentiation of bone cells (osteoblast, osteoclast and osteocytes) and the formation of bone tissue. However, conventional scaffold materials for bone tissue engineering proved less valuable for actual applications because they lack mechanical strength, interconnected channel network, and controllable porosity or channel size. Therefore,to explore the ideal scaffold materials is one of the popular studies on current bone tissue engineering. In this paper, we review, the application and advancement of a newly-developed technology generally known as rapid prototyping (RP) techniques in bone tissue engineering.