An automated parametric ear model to improve frugal 3D scanning methods for the advanced manufacturing of high-quality prosthetic ears.

Ear prostheses are commonly used for restoring aesthetics to those suffering missing or malformed external ears. Traditional fabrication of these prostheses is labour intensive and requires expert skill from a prosthetist. Advanced manufacturing including 3D scanning, modelling and 3D printing has the potential to improve this process, although more work is required before it is ready for routine clinical use.

Reproducibility of the computational fluid dynamic analysis of a cerebral aneurysm monitored over a decade.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are increasingly utilised to evaluate intracranial aneurysm (IA) haemodynamics to aid in the prediction of morphological changes and rupture risk. However, these models vary and differences in published results warrant the investigation of IA-CFD reproducibility. This study aims to explore sources of intra-team variability and determine its impact on the aneurysm morphology and CFD parameters.

Fluid-Structure Interaction Within Models of Patient-Specific Arteries: Computational Simulations and Experimental Validations.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality worldwide and its incidence is rising due to an aging population. The development and progression of CVD is directly linked to adverse vascular hemodynamics and biomechanics, whose in-vivo measurement remains challenging but can be simulated numerically and experimentally. The ability to evaluate these parameters in patient-specific CVD cases is crucial to better predict future disease progression, risk of adverse events, and treatment efficacy.

Corrigendum: The effects of COVID-19 on the placenta during pregnancy.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2021.

Personalized Volumetric Tissue Generation by Enhancing Multiscale Mass Transport through 3D Printed Scaffolds in Perfused Bioreactors.

Engineered tissues provide an alternative to graft material, circumventing the use of donor tissue such as autografts or allografts and non-physiological synthetic implants. However, their lack of vasculature limits the growth of volumetric tissue more than several millimeters thick which limits their success post-implantation. Perfused bioreactors enhance nutrient mass transport inside lab-grown tissue but remain poorly customizable to support the culture of personalized implants.

3D Plotting of Calcium Phosphate Cement and Melt Electrowriting of Polycaprolactone Microfibers in One Scaffold: A Hybrid Additive Manufacturing Process.

The fabrication of patient-specific scaffolds for bone substitutes is possible through extrusion-based 3D printing of calcium phosphate cements (CPC) which allows the generation of structures with a high degree of customization and interconnected porosity. Given the brittleness of this clinically approved material, the stability of open-porous scaffolds cannot always be secured. Herein, a multi-technological approach allowed the simultaneous combination of CPC printing with melt electrowriting (MEW) of polycaprolactone (PCL) microfibers in an alternating, tunable design in one automated fabrication process.

Image analyses for engineering advanced tissue biomanufacturing processes.

Industrial cell culture processes are inherently expensive, time-consuming, and variable. These limitations have become a critical bottleneck for the industrial translation of human cell and tissue biomanufacturing, as few human cell culture products deliver sufficient benefit, value, and consistency to offset their high manufacturing costs and produce useful clinical or biomedical solutions. Recent advances in biomedical image analysis and computational modelling can enhance the design and operation of high-efficiency tissue biomanufacturing platforms, as well as the high-content characterisation and monitoring of culture performance, to enable bioprocess control, optimisation, and automation.

Soft pneumatic actuators for mimicking multi-axial femoropopliteal artery mechanobiology.

Tissue biomanufacturing aims to produce lab-grown stem cell grafts and biomimetic drug testing platforms but remains limited in its ability to recapitulate native tissue mechanics. The emerging field of soft robotics aims to emulate dynamic physiological locomotion, representing an ideal approach to recapitulate physiologically complex mechanical stimuli and enhance patient-specific tissue maturation. The kneecap's femoropopliteal artery (FPA) represents a highly flexible tissue across multiple axes during blood flow, walking, standing, and crouching positions, and these complex biomechanics are implicated in the FPA's frequent presentation of peripheral artery disease.

Ultrasound Imaging Offers Promising Alternative to Create 3-D Models for Personalised Auricular Implants.

Three-dimensional imaging and advanced manufacturing are being applied in health care research to create novel diagnostic and surgical planning methods, as well as personalised treatments and implants. For ear reconstruction, where a cartilage-shaped implant is embedded underneath the skin to re-create shape and form, volumetric imaging and segmentation processing to capture patient anatomy are particularly challenging. Here, we introduce 3-D ultrasound (US) as an available option for imaging the external ear and underlying auricular cartilage structure, and compare it with computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) against micro-CT (µCT) as a high-resolution reference (gold standard).

The Effects of COVID-19 on the Placenta During Pregnancy.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused a global pandemic. The virus primarily affects the lungs where it induces respiratory distress syndrome ranging from mild to acute, however, there is a growing body of evidence supporting its negative effects on other system organs that also carry the ACE2 receptor, such as the placenta. The majority of newborns delivered from SARS-CoV-2 positive mothers test negative following delivery, suggesting that there are protective mechanisms within the placenta.

A quantitative analysis of cell bridging kinetics on a scaffold using computer vision algorithms.

Tissue engineering involves the seeding of cells into a structural scaffolding to regenerate the architecture of damaged or diseased tissue. To effectively design a scaffold, an understanding of how cells collectively sense and react to the geometry of their local environment is needed. Advances in the development of melt electro-writing have allowed micron and submicron polymeric fibres to be accurately printed into porous, complex and three-dimensional structures.

Model-based data analysis of tissue growth in thin 3D printed scaffolds.

Tissue growth in three-dimensional (3D) printed scaffolds enables exploration and control of cell behaviour in more biologically realistic geometries than that allowed by traditional 2D cell culture. Cell proliferation and migration in these experiments have yet to be explicitly characterised, limiting the ability of experimentalists to determine the effects of various experimental conditions, such as scaffold geometry, on cell behaviour. We consider tissue growth by osteoblastic cells in melt electro-written scaffolds that comprise thin square pores with sizes that were deliberately increased between experiments.

A deep learning method for automatic segmentation of the bony orbit in MRI and CT images.

This paper proposes a fully automatic method to segment the inner boundary of the bony orbit in two different image modalities: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT). The method, based on a deep learning architecture, uses two fully convolutional neural networks in series followed by a graph-search method to generate a boundary for the orbit. When compared to human performance for segmentation of both CT and MRI data, the proposed method achieves high Dice coefficients on both orbit and background, with scores of 0.

A Spatiotemporal Microenvironment Model to Improve Design of a Three-Dimensional Bioreactor for Red Cell Production.

Cellular microenvironments provide stimuli, including paracrine and autocrine growth factors and physicochemical cues, which support efficient cell production unmatched by current biomanufacturing platforms. While three-dimensional (3D) culture systems aim to recapitulate niche architecture and function of the target tissue/organ, they are limited in accessing spatiotemporal information to evaluate and optimize cell/tissue process development. Herein, a mathematical modeling framework is parameterized by single-cell phenotypic imaging and multiplexed biochemical assays to simulate the nonuniform tissue distribution of nutrients/metabolites and growth factors in cell niche environments.

Frugal 3D scanning using smartphones provides an accessible framework for capturing the external ear.

Three-dimensional (3D) scanning technologies, such as medical imaging and surface scanning, have important applications for capturing patient anatomy to create personalised prosthetics. Digital approaches for capturing anatomical detail as opposed to traditional, invasive impression techniques significantly reduces turnaround times and lower production costs while still maintaining the high aesthetic quality of the end product. While previous case studies utilise expensive 3D scanning and modelling frameworks, their clinical translation is limited due to high equipment costs.

The impact of plasma 25-hydroxyvitamin D on pulmonary function and exercise physiology in cystic fibrosis: A multicentre retrospective study.

Background: A 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25OHD) may exert immunomodulatory effects on respiratory health, which may translate to improvements in exercise physiology. Thus, we aimed to investigate whether plasma 25OHD is associated with lung function and aerobic fitness in people with cystic fibrosis (pwCF).

Methods: A multicentre retrospective review of pwCF (> 9 years old) attending the Royal Hospital for Sick Children (Edinburgh) or Wessex CF-Unit (Southampton) was performed between July 2017 and October 2019.