Principal investigator: Jessica Zhang
University: Carnegie Mellon University
Industry partner: HexSpline3D LLC
Engineered muscle tissues have broad applications in injury repair, pharmaceutical screening, and even the emerging field of biohybrid robotics. However, existing muscle tissue design tools fail to capture the changes in geometry and mechanical capabilities that occur during fabrication and maturation of muscle tissues. Furthermore, existing state-of-the-art fabrication of muscle tissue requires costly and highly manual fabrication approaches. While 3D bioprinting shows great promise towards scalable fabrication of muscle tissues, scaling production for manufacturing requires tools to ensure quality and reliability of printed tissues, predict the performance of final printed tissues, and allow users to reliability design to muscle-based tissues for printing. This proposal seeks to address this need and improve biomanufacturing of engineered muscle tissue by creating a computer-in-the-loop manufacturing pipeline to design, fabricate, and monitor muscle tissues. We will (1) generate a dataset of bio-printed muscle for manufacturing research, (2) create a novel B-spline based image segmentation technique and software tool to reconstruct muscle tissues, and (3) develop a computer-in-the-loop manufacturing pipeline to construct a digital twin of 3D printed muscle tissue. This proposal will partner researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and HexSpline3D LLC, a Pennsylvania-based startup.