Page 245 - IJB-9-3

International Journal of Bioprinting

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Continuous and highly accurate multi-material

extrusion-based bioprinting with optical
coherence tomography imaging

Jin Wang , Chen Xu , Shanshan Yang , Ling Wang *, Mingen Xu *
1,2
1,2
1
1
1
1 School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
2 Key Laboratory of Medical Information and 3D Biological of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou,
Zhejiang, China

Abstract

Extrusion-based bioprinting is a widely used approach to construct artificial organs or
tissues in the medical fields due to its easy operation and good ability to combine multi-
material. Nevertheless, the current technology is limited to some printing errors when
combining multi-material printing, including mismatch between printing filaments
of different materials and error deposited materials (e.g., under-extrusion and over-
extrusion). These errors will affect the function of the printed structure (e.g., mechanical
and biological properties), and the traditional manual correction methods are
inefficient in time and material, so an automatic procedure is needed to improve multi-
material printing accuracy and efficiency. However, to the best of our knowledge, very
few automated procedure can achieve the registration between printing filaments of
*Corresponding authors: different materials. Herein, we utilized optical coherence tomography (OCT) to monitor
Ling Wang printing process and presented a multi-material static model and a time-related control
(lingw@hdu.edu.cn)
Mingen Xu model in extrusion-based multi-material bioprinting. Specifically, the multi-material
(xumingen@hdu.edu.cn) static model revealed the relationship between printed filament metrics (filament
size and layer thickness) and printing parameters (printing speeds or pressures) with
Citation: Wang J, Xu C, Yang S,
et al., 2023, Continuous and highly different materials, which enables the registration of printing filaments by rapid selection
accurate multi-material extrusion- of printing parameters for the materials, while time-related control model could correct
based bioprinting with optical control parameters of nozzles to reduce the material deposition error at connection
coherence tomography imaging.
Int J Bioprint, 9(3): 707. point between nozzles in a short time. According to the experimental results of single-
https://doi.org/10.18063/ijb.707 layer scaffold and multi-layer scaffold, material deposition error is eliminated, and the
same layer thickness between different materials of the same layer is achieved, which
Received: November 17, 2022
Accepted: January 02, 2023 proves the accuracy and practicability of these models. The proposed models could
Published Online: March 13, 2023 achieve improved precision of printed structure and printing efficiency.
Copyright: © 2023 Author(s).
This is an Open Access article
distributed under the terms of the Keywords: Optical coherence tomography; Multi-material; Multi-nozzle; Printing
Creative Commons Attribution control; Bioprinted scaffold
License, permitting distribution
and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is
properly cited.
1. Introduction
Publisher’s Note: Whioce
Publishing remains neutral with In recent years, bioprinting technology, which allows the generation of customized
regard to jurisdictional claims in human organs or tissues, has become as a promising tool to meet the global demand for
published maps and institutional
affiliations. organ transplantation [1-3] , and many works have been reported on the technology and

Volume 9 Issue 3 (2023) 237 https://doi.org/10.18063/ijb.707