Modeling and path planning of customized wound matrix for bioprinting

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1655737 (Table of Contents)

Chronic wounds, including pressure and diabetic ulcers, constitute a serious and expensive health care problem as they have a considerable socio-economic impact worldwide. As it may take several months for the healing of chronic wounds, in order to improve wound healing, 3D bioprinting has emerged as an important tool in regenerative medicine to address the challenges of current treatment methods such as the risk and expense of surgery, donor site morbidity, infection and host rejection. Bioprinting fabricates customized biological constructs by depositing living cells, biomaterials and growth factors layer-by-layer based on a computer-aided-design (CAD). However, the data obtained by various imaging methods such as computed axial tomography (CAT), ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides a series of two-dimensional cross-sections. The main problem is to reconstruct the 3D surfaces from two-dimensional contours. In this study, a new algorithm is proposed to regenerate the wound surface from planar cross-sections and resulting CAD model can be used in wound measurement and patientspecific porous scaffold generation for 3D bioprinting. The proposed method generates smooth and non-twisted NURBS surfaces from a set of planar cross-sections satisfying the assumption of higher cross-sections involves the area bounded by lower cross-sections which is the case of wound geometries. Also, homogeneous porous scaffolds and threedimensional bioprinting path planning are developed based on the resulting wound surface by using the developed algorithm. The proposed algorithm provides more accurate surfaces for complex wound geometries, compared to two commonly used methods: curve lofting and swept surface generation. The developed algorithm approximates smooth and non-twisted surfaces on the cross-sections with sudden changes in shape, sharp edges and multiple branches.