Embedded 3D printing of engineered lung cancer model for assisting fine-needle aspiration biopsy.

Lung cancer is a serious global health issue that requires the development of patient-specific, lung cancer model for surgical planning to train interventionalists and improve the accuracy of biopsies. Although the emergence of three-dimensional (3D) printing provides a promising solution to create customized models with complicated architectures, current 3D printing methods cannot accurately duplicate anatomical-level lung constructs with tumor(s) which are applicable for hands-on training and procedure planning. To address this issue, an embedded printing strategy is proposed to create respiratory bronchioles, blood vessels, and tumors in a photocurable yield-stress matrix bath.

Multiscale embedded printing of engineered human tissue and organ equivalents.

Creating tissue and organ equivalents with intricate architectures and multiscale functional feature sizes is the first step toward the reconstruction of transplantable human tissues and organs. Existing embedded ink writing approaches are limited by achievable feature sizes ranging from hundreds of microns to tens of millimeters, which hinders their ability to accurately duplicate structures found in various human tissues and organs. In this study, a multiscale embedded printing (MSEP) strategy is developed, in which a stimuli-responsive yield-stress fluid is applied to facilitate the printing process.

Three-Dimensional Printing in Stimuli-Responsive Yield-Stress Fluid with an Interactive Dual Microstructure.

Yield-stress support bath-enabled three-dimensional (3D) printing has been widely used in recent years for diverse applications. However, current yield-stress fluids usually possess single microstructures and still face the challenges of on-demand adding and/or removing support bath materials during printing, constraining their application scope. This study aims to propose a concept of stimuli-responsive yield-stress fluids with an interactive dual microstructure as support bath materials.