For Charité Berlin, VoxelDance and DREIGEIST print a cardiovascular artery with VoxelDance Additive

 

VoxelDance and DREIGEIST recently collaborated on the production of a fully transparent model of a cardiovascular artery within the scope of an investigative project conducted by the Institute for Imaging Science and Computational Modelling in Cardiovascular Medicine of Charité Berlin.

Charite is one of the largest university hospitals in Europe.  The school has been ranked number one among European medical schools for many years and has won half of the Nobel prizes in medicine and physiology in German history.  

 

 

 

The Berlin scientists´ intention was to use the model for Particle Image Velocimetry – an analysis method where a liquid or gaseous flow is “doped” by adding particles to the stream to be detected by a laser optical system in order to unveil the flow characteristics of a certain geometry. Traditional PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry) models are commonly used to visualize and analyze the flow behavior of a medium around certain geometries, like cars, aircraft, buildings and so on. Charité is turning things around by using their model of a lung artery section to see what is going on inside such a biofluidic vessel.

Working with organic shapes in medical modelling applications often poses various challenges in the pre-printing stage already since the inherent need for support structures in photopolymer 3D-printing play a very critical and important role.

VoxelDance Additive software is a cost-effective powerful 3D printing software solution with vertical workflow capability. It has very efficient and optimized support function. The smart support functionality enabled DREIGEIST to create a stable and easily removable solution in a matter of seconds, minimizing the amount of stubborn part-to-part connections necessary.

The responsible at Charité chose Ultracur3D® ST45 photopolymer material by BASF ForwardAM for delivering both the necessary surface quality along with the needed level of model transparency, after they had optically characterized a wide range of material samples. The application engineers at DREIGEIST decided on the latest generation UV LCD printing technology by UnionTech for processing their clients´ choice of BASF photopolymer material for this project.