What is it about?
3D printing technologies enable the design of complex structures that may be optimized for a specific patient's needs. These structures may be implanted in the body to encourage regenerative tissue growth, such as repairing broken bone. In this paper we develop new 3D printed lattice designs and mechanically test them to determine their suitability for bone tissue engineering.
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Why is it important?
Our findings better characterize 3D printing processes that are an emerging technology with far-reaching capabilities. In particular, we demonstrate how different design parameters such as altering a lattice's beam diameter size and porosity can influence its overall stiffness in non-obvious manners. We demonstrate the technology is capable of producing tissue scaffolds that could lead to regenerative bone growth in the spine.
Perspectives
This paper was the culmination of years of research during my post-doc and incorporates findings from four earlier papers in an overall project of developing spinal cage devices for vertebral fusion. When considering all the works as a whole, 3D printing was determined to be a feasible approach for creating tissue scaffolds with efficient mechanical and biological properties for carrying biomechanical loads and encouraging tissue growth.
Dr. Paul Egan
Texas Tech University System
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mechanics of Three-Dimensional Printed Lattices for Biomedical Devices, Journal of Mechanical Design, January 2019, ASME International,
DOI: 10.1115/1.4042213.
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