Predictive Modeling of Droplet Formation Processes in Inkjet-Based Bioprinting

Author(s):  
Dazhong Wu ◽  
Changxue Xu

Additive manufacturing is driving major innovations in many areas such as biomedical engineering. Recent advances have enabled three-dimensional (3D) printing of biocompatible materials and cells into complex 3D functional living tissues and organs using bio-printable materials (i.e., bioink). Inkjet-based bioprinting fabricates the tissue and organ constructs by ejecting droplets onto a substrate. Compared with microextrusion-based and laser-assisted bioprinting, it is very difficult to predict and control the droplet formation process (e.g., droplet velocity and volume). To address this issue, this paper presents a new data-driven approach to predicting droplet velocity and volume in the inkjet-based bioprinting process. An imaging system was used to monitor the droplet formation process. To investigate the effects of polymer concentration, excitation voltage, dwell time, and rise time on droplet velocity and volume, a full factorial design of experiments (DOE) was conducted. Two predictive models were developed to predict droplet velocity and volume using ensemble learning. The accuracy of the two predictive models was measured using the root-mean-square error (RMSE), relative error (RE), and coefficient of determination (R2). Experimental results have shown that the predictive models are capable of predicting droplet velocity and volume with sufficient accuracy.

Author(s):  
Dazhong Wu ◽  
Changxue Xu ◽  
Srikumar Krishnamoorthy

Additive manufacturing is driving major innovations in many areas such as biomedical engineering. Recent advances have enabled 3D printing of biocompatible materials and cells into complex 3D functional living tissues and organs using bioink. Inkjet-based bioprinting fabricates the tissue and organ constructs by ejecting droplets onto a substrate. Compared with microextrusion-based and laser-assisted bioprinting, it is very difficult to predict and control the droplet formation process (e.g., droplet velocity and size). To address this issue, this paper presents a new data-driven approach to predict droplet velocity and size in the inkjet-based bioprinting process. An imaging system was used to monitor the droplet formation process. To investigate the effects of excitation voltage, dwell time, and rise time on droplet velocity and droplet size, a full factorial design of experiments was conducted. Two predictive models were developed to predict droplet velocity and droplet size using random forests. The accuracy of the two predictive models was evaluated using the relative error. Experimental results have shown that the predictive models are capable of predicting droplet velocity and size with sufficient accuracy.


Micromachines ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1408
Author(s):  
Christina Kryou ◽  
Ioannis Theodorakos ◽  
Panagiotis Karakaidos ◽  
Apostolos Klinakis ◽  
Antonios Hatziapostolou ◽  
...  

Bioprinting offers great potential for the fabrication of three-dimensional living tissues by the precise layer-by-layer printing of biological materials, including living cells and cell-laden hydrogels. The laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) of cell-laden bioinks is one of the most promising laser-printing technologies enabling biofabrication. However, for it to be a viable bioprinting technology, bioink printability must be carefully examined. In this study, we used a time-resolved imaging system to study the cell-laden bioink droplet formation process in terms of the droplet size, velocity, and traveling distance. For this purpose, the bioinks were prepared using breast cancer cells with different cell concentrations to evaluate the effect of the cell concentration on the droplet formation process and the survival of the cells after printing. These bioinks were compared with cell-free bioinks under the same printing conditions to understand the effect of the particle physical properties on the droplet formation procedure. The morphology of the printed droplets indicated that it is possible to print uniform droplets for a wide range of cell concentrations. Overall, it is concluded that the laser fluence and the distance of the donor–receiver substrates play an important role in the printing impingement type; consequently, a careful adjustment of these parameters can lead to high-quality printing.


Author(s):  
Peng-Ching Ho ◽  
Yit Fatt Yap ◽  
Nam-Trung Nguyen ◽  
John Chai Chee Kiong ◽  
Teck Neng Wong ◽  
...  

The present article presents a numerical investigation on the effect of thermal forcing for droplet formation in a T-junction. Thermal forcing, generated by a heater embedded into the channel wall, induces a non-uniform temperature field which results in the variation the fluids’ properties and affects the droplet formation process in a desirable manner. In the present article, droplet formation process is posed as an incompressible immiscible two-phase flow problem with the motion of the two-phases strongly coupled via the related interfacial conditions. It is governed by the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes and the energy equations. The interface is captured with a narrow-band particle level-set method. Solutions are obtained using a finite volume method on a staggered mesh. The numerical model is validated against droplet formation in a cross junction. With the formation of water droplet in oil within the squeezing formation regime as a case study, the physics underlying droplet formation process in a T-junction affected by a thermal forcing is investigated. The combined effect of variations in both viscosities and surface tension result in a larger droplet. It is believed that the behavior of fluids system under an imposed thermal forcing depends strongly on the characteristics of temperature dependent viscosities and surface tension.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wu-zhou Li ◽  
Zhi-wen Liang ◽  
Yi Cao ◽  
Ting-ting Cao ◽  
Hong Quan ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Tumor motion may compromise the accuracy of liver stereotactic radiotherapy. In order to carry out a precise planning, estimating liver tumor motion during radiotherapy has received a lot of attention. Previous approach may have difficult to deal with image data corrupted by noise. The iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm is widely used for estimating the rigid registration of three-dimensional point sets when these data were dense or corrupted. In the light of this, our study estimated the three-dimensional (3D) rigid motion of liver tumors during stereotactic liver radiotherapy using reconstructed 3D coordinates of fiducials based on the ICP algorithm. Methods Four hundred ninety-five pairs of orthogonal kilovoltage (KV) images from the CyberKnife stereo imaging system for 12 patients were used in this study. For each pair of images, the 3D coordinates of fiducial markers inside the liver were calculated via geometric derivations. The 3D coordinates were used to calculate the real-time translational and rotational motion of liver tumors around three axes via an ICP algorithm. The residual error was also investigated both with and without rotational correction. Results The translational shifts of liver tumors in left-right (LR), anterior-posterior (AP),and superior-inferior (SI) directions were 2.92 ± 1.98 mm, 5.54 ± 3.12 mm, and 16.22 ± 5.86 mm, respectively; the rotational angles in left-right (LR), anterior-posterior (AP), and superior-inferior (SI) directions were 3.95° ± 3.08°, 4.93° ± 2.90°, and 4.09° ± 1.99°, respectively. Rotational correction decreased 3D fiducial displacement from 1.19 ± 0.35 mm to 0.65 ± 0.24 mm (P<0.001). Conclusions The maximum translational movement occurred in the SI direction. Rotational correction decreased fiducial displacements and increased tumor tracking accuracy.


Author(s):  
Sunil K. Deokar ◽  
Nachiket A. Gokhale ◽  
Sachin A. Mandavgane

Abstract Biomass ashes like rice husk ash (RHA), bagasse fly ash (BFA), were used for aqueous phase removal of a pesticide, diuron. Response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN) were successfully applied to estimate and optimize the conditions for the maximum diuron adsorption using biomass ashes. The effect of operational parameters such as initial concentration (10–30 mg/L); contact time (0.93–16.07 h) and adsorbent dosage (20–308 mg) on adsorption were studied using central composite design (CCD) matrix. Same design was also employed to gain a training set for ANN. The maximum diuron removal of 88.95 and 99.78% was obtained at initial concentration of 15 mg/L, time of 12 h, RHA dosage of 250 mg and at initial concentration of 14 mg/L, time of 13 h, BFA dosage of 60 mg respectively. Estimation of coefficient of determination (R 2) and mean errors obtained for ANN and RSM (R 2 RHA = 0.976, R 2 BFA = 0.943) proved ANN (R 2 RHA = 0.997, R 2 BFA = 0.982) fits better. By employing RSM coupled with ANN model, the qualitative and quantitative activity relationship of experimental data was visualized in three dimensional spaces. The current approach will be instrumental in providing quick preliminary estimations in process and product development.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 2858
Author(s):  
Kelly Ka-Lee Lai ◽  
Timothy Tin-Yan Lee ◽  
Michael Ka-Shing Lee ◽  
Joseph Chi-Ho Hui ◽  
Yong-Ping Zheng

To diagnose scoliosis, the standing radiograph with Cobb’s method is the gold standard for clinical practice. Recently, three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging, which is radiation-free and inexpensive, has been demonstrated to be reliable for the assessment of scoliosis and validated by several groups. A portable 3D ultrasound system for scoliosis assessment is very much demanded, as it can further extend its potential applications for scoliosis screening, diagnosis, monitoring, treatment outcome measurement, and progress prediction. The aim of this study was to investigate the reliability of a newly developed portable 3D ultrasound imaging system, Scolioscan Air, for scoliosis assessment using coronal images it generated. The system was comprised of a handheld probe and tablet PC linking with a USB cable, and the probe further included a palm-sized ultrasound module together with a low-profile optical spatial sensor. A plastic phantom with three different angle structures built-in was used to evaluate the accuracy of measurement by positioning in 10 different orientations. Then, 19 volunteers with scoliosis (13F and 6M; Age: 13.6 ± 3.2 years) with different severity of scoliosis were assessed. Each subject underwent scanning by a commercially available 3D ultrasound imaging system, Scolioscan, and the portable 3D ultrasound imaging system, with the same posture on the same date. The spinal process angles (SPA) were measured in the coronal images formed by both systems and compared with each other. The angle phantom measurement showed the measured angles well agreed with the designed values, 59.7 ± 2.9 vs. 60 degrees, 40.8 ± 1.9 vs. 40 degrees, and 20.9 ± 2.1 vs. 20 degrees. For the subject tests, results demonstrated that there was a very good agreement between the angles obtained by the two systems, with a strong correlation (R2 = 0.78) for the 29 curves measured. The absolute difference between the two data sets was 2.9 ± 1.8 degrees. In addition, there was a small mean difference of 1.2 degrees, and the differences were symmetrically distributed around the mean difference according to the Bland–Altman test. Scolioscan Air was sufficiently comparable to Scolioscan in scoliosis assessment, overcoming the space limitation of Scolioscan and thus providing wider applications. Further studies involving a larger number of subjects are worthwhile to demonstrate its potential clinical values for the management of scoliosis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angika Bulbul ◽  
Joseph Rosen

AbstractPartial aperture imaging system (PAIS) is a recently developed concept in which the traditional disc-shaped aperture is replaced by an aperture with a much smaller area and yet its imaging capabilities are comparable to the full aperture systems. Recently PAIS was demonstrated as an indirect incoherent digital three-dimensional imaging technique. Later it was successfully implemented in the study of the synthetic marginal aperture with revolving telescopes (SMART) to provide superresolution with subaperture area that was less than one percent of the area of the full synthetic disc-shaped aperture. In the study of SMART, the concept of PAIS was tested by placing eight coded phase reflectors along the boundary of the full synthetic aperture. In the current study, various improvements of PAIS are tested and its performance is compared with the other equivalent systems. Among the structural changes, we test ring-shaped eight coded phase subapertures with the same area as of the previous circular subapertures, distributed along the boundary of the full disc-shaped aperture. Another change in the current system is the use of coded phase mask with a point response of a sparse dot pattern. The third change is in the reconstruction process in which a nonlinear correlation with optimal parameters is implemented. With the improved image quality, the modified-PAIS can save weight and cost of imaging devices in general and of space telescopes in particular. Experimental results with reflective objects show that the concept of coded aperture extends the limits of classical imaging.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document