A New Solution for In-Situ Monitoring of Extrusion-Based Bioprinting Via Infrared Imaging

Abstract

Bioprinting is an interdisciplinary study field, where additive manufacturing is combined with tissue engineering and material sciences. The ever-increasing need for personalized medicine fueled interest in the possibility of reproducing biological tissues with this technique, allowing bioprinting to establish itself in the biomedical research as one the most promising. Producing bioconstructs that resemble living tissues is a very complex and multi-step procedure.Given the complexity of the processes involved, the literature still lacks robust solutions for monitoring the bioprinted construct quality, especially in-situ and in-line. Here, a novel non-destructive approach for monitoring the geometries of bioprinted constructs based on Infrared (IR) Imaging is proposed. Instead of using IR information to gain information on the temperature signature, we propose IR video imaging as a viable solution to overcome traditional problems of visible range imaging for geometry reconstruction. The results obtained show a significant direction for in-line monitoring of bioprinting processes.

Keywords: additive manufacturing, 3D bioprinting, thermal imaging, monitoring, in-situ