Synchrotron imaging techniques for bone and cartilage tissue engineering: potential, current trends, and future directions.

Biomedical imaging is crucial to the success of bone/cartilage tissue engineering (TE) by providing detailed three-dimensional information on tissue-engineered scaffolds and associated bone/cartilage growth during the healing process. Synchrotron radiation (SR)-based biomedical imaging is an emerging technique for this purpose that has been drawing considerable recent attention. Due to the unique properties of synchrotron light, SR biomedical imaging can provide information that conventional X-ray imaging is not able to capture.