| Abstract [eng] |
Around the world, organ‐donor shortages leave thousands of patients without lifesaving treatment available to them creating an always present strain in the medical system. Bioprinting, the highly promising technology for the assembly of living tissues, could provide a sustainable alternative, to solve this issue. However, currently available technologies still struggle to recreate the fine architecture of real organs. Three-dimensional cell cultures and organoids come forward as invaluable tools for organ and tissue development studies and disease modeling. Biocompatible scaffolds are one of the tools specifically designed to improve organoid culture development. Unfortunately, due to the lack of easily reproducible and highly tunable scaffold fabrication, organoid research still leans on labor-intensive, low-throughput methods. Two-photon polymerization (2PP) offers the sub-micron resolution needed to print intricate biocompatible scaffolds that could elevate 3D cultures and streamline the overall development process. Integrating a spatial-light modulator (SLM) can improve the relatively slow 2PP technology by changing the shape of the volumized pixel (voxel). For that process SLM uses phase masks. A phase mask is a gray-scale image that recreates the desired voxel in 3D space. While effective, the process of phase mask generation and voxel modification is complicated and hard to control deterministically. This in turn limits applicability and proliferation of SLM enhanced 2PP in biofabrication and bioprinting. This study aims to determine the current capabilities of phase mask generation and voxel optimization in order to make the process of organoid scaffold printing more efficient. |
