Concurrent two-scale topology optimization of printable bone scaffolds via rectified-flow generation and exact latent-space refinement
physics.comp-ph, cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-10-18
Updated: 2026-10-18
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Bone scaffolds must reconcile a macroscale mechanical response with microscale geometric feasibility, yet conventional approaches to their design restrict attainable constitutive properties.
Terminology
Abstract
Bone scaffolds must reconcile a macroscale mechanical response with microscale geometric feasibility, yet conventional approaches to their design restrict attainable constitutive properties. This work presents a concurrent two-scale topology optimization framework; a conditional rectified flow generates periodic lattice microstructures, which are then refined in latent space by exact finite-element homogenization sensitivities. The resulting unit-cell geometries and their spatial assignments are jointly optimized under mechanical and feature-size constraints. In a distal rabbit femur benchmark, all eight flow-started refinements produce printable cells with maximum relative errors under 1% across six prescribed engineering moduli. Constructing the implant from a single tiled cell reproduces intact whole-femur compliance within 0.1% and regional strain energy within 0.35% under four loading conditions. In human femoral reconstruction, multiscale concurrent optimization produces a cortical mid-shaft scaffold with porosity 63% while satisfying the compliance constraint within 2% under walking and stair-climbing loads. It achieves an 84% porosity on a proximal cancellous scaffold with strain-energy deviations below 0.25% under the same loads. Analysis of the learned representations reveals distinct architectural families in latent space. Further, the attention heads of the rectified-flow transformer specialize for spatial shifts -- learning the analogue of a finite-difference stencil -- and coordinate symmetries, with ablations showing their influence on generated topologies. These results establish a route to printable, mechanically constrained scaffold designs. The framework is general enough for extending to many other multiscale structural design applications including topology-microstructure co-design in metal additive manufacturing.
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