Imaging regenerating bone tissue based on neural networks applied to micro-diffraction measurements

We monitored bone regeneration in a tissue engineering approach. To visualize and understand the structural evolution, the samples have been measured by X-ray micro-diffraction. We find that bone tissue regeneration proceeds through a multi-step mechanism, each step providing a specific diffraction signal. The large amount of data have been classified according to their structure and associated to the process they came from combining Neural Networks algorithms with least square pattern analysis. In this way, we obtain spatial maps of the different components of the tissues visualizing the complex kinetic at the base of the bone regeneration. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.