Abstract
Purpose :
Recent advances in multiphoton fabrication have made the production of complex structures possible and may allow the production of unique ocular models useful in mechanobiological studies. The purpose of this study is to optimize two photon (2P) subtractive fabrication techniques for patient-specific lamina cribrosas (LC) from segmented images.
Methods :
For this study, we used multiphoton images of the human LC from a previous study. The segmented second harmonic signal of these images were used to generate the 2P input binary images. 2P subtractive fabrication was executed on a quarter of the LC image using an Olympus BX51 upright laser-scanning microscope (Insight DS+, Spectra Physics, Santa Clara, CA). The laser was centered at 780 nm and electro-spun polycaprolactone (PCL) sheet was used to laser-cut the LC.
Results :
Preliminary results show that the human LC can be produced using 2P subtractive fabrication. An image of the fabricated LC is shown in Figure1. Figure 1A shows the LC segmented input image and Figure 1B shows the fabricated LC.
Conclusions :
While we are able to produce a portion of a human LC using 2P subtractive fabrication, there are limitations to this technique. While it may be possible to use this technique to generate LC structural alterations in the Z dimension, our current approach is limited as it is currently only able to produce excellent details of the LC in the X-Y plane. Further work is needed to optimize our technique to improve the fabrication of 3D LC structures.
Research reported in this abstract was supported by the National Eye Institute under award number R01EY020890 to JPVG and grant number R01FD006582 (JV Co-I, PI: Feinberg and Badylak).
This abstract was presented at the 2022 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Denver, CO, May 1-4, 2022, and virtually.