Guidelines for managing data and processes in bone and cartilage tissue engineering

BMC Bioinformatics

Research

Silvia Scaglione¹  Alessandro Orro²  Federica Viti²  Luciano Milanesi² 

[1]Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dell'Informazione e delle Telecomunicazioni, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via De Marini 6, 16149, Genova, Italy

[2]Istituto di Tecnologie Biomediche, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via Fratelli Cervi 93, 20090, Segrate, Mi, Italy

关键词: Tissue Engineering;    Semantic Approach;    Cartilage Tissue Engineering;    Tissue Engineering Approach;    Promote Tissue Regeneration;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2105-15-S1-S14

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIn the last decades, a wide number of researchers/clinicians involved in tissue engineering field published several works about the possibility to induce a tissue regeneration guided by the use of biomaterials. To this aim, different scaffolds have been proposed, and their effectiveness tested through in vitro and/or in vivo experiments. In this context, integration and meta-analysis approaches are gaining importance for analyses and reuse of data as, for example, those concerning the bone and cartilage biomarkers, the biomolecular factors intervening in cell differentiation and growth, the morphology and the biomechanical performance of a neo-formed tissue, and, in general, the scaffolds' ability to promote tissue regeneration. Therefore standards and ontologies are becoming crucial, to provide a unifying knowledge framework for annotating data and supporting the semantic integration and the unambiguous interpretation of novel experimental results.ResultsIn this paper a conceptual framework has been designed for bone/cartilage tissue engineering domain, by now completely lacking standardized methods. A set of guidelines has been provided, defining the minimum information set necessary for describing an experimental study involved in bone and cartilage regenerative medicine field. In addition, a Bone/Cartilage Tissue Engineering Ontology (BCTEO) has been developed to provide a representation of the domain's concepts, specifically oriented to cells, and chemical composition, morphology, physical characterization of biomaterials involved in bone/cartilage tissue engineering research.ConclusionsConsidering that tissue engineering is a discipline that traverses different semantic fields and employs many data types, the proposed instruments represent a first attempt to standardize the domain knowledge and can provide a suitable means to integrate data across the field.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Viti et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014