CAD has been traditionally used to assist in engineering design and modeling for representation, analysis and manufacturing. Advances in Information Technology and in Biomedicine have created new uses for CAD with many novel and important biomedical applications. Such applications can be found, for example, in the design and modeling of orthopedics, medical implants, and tissue modeling which can describe the morphology, heterogeneity, and organizational structure of tissue and anatomy through 3D reconstructive biomodeling. The combination of biomodeling with rapid prototyping techniques has proven to be an effective tool for computer-aided surgery, particularly for pre-operative diagnosis, surgical rehearsal and planning, and post-operative assessments. In addition, CAD techniques have become very important in computer-aided tissue engineering for biomimetic design, analysis, simulation and freeform fabrication of tissue scaffolds and substitutes.
This special issue of Computer-Aided Design will focus on the technical challenges that arise in CAD modeling, design, analysis, and freeform fabrication for biomedical and tissue engineering applications. Technical advances, developments, and novel applications of bio-CAD pertinent to the following topics are of particular interest: