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P5-1. Quality Assurance of 3D Printed Soft Tissue Scaffolds

Project leader: Marie-Luise Wille (Science and Engineering Faculty, QUT)
Industry partner: BellaSeno
Fig. 1: BellaSeno resorbable polymer scaffold.
Objective:
    Current quality control of the breast scaffolds is performed via mechanical testing, which may be destructive and visual inspection by the technician. The non-destructive gold standard is microCT imaging and analysis, however this method is very expensive, time-consuming and limited to a few scaffolds only. The objective of this project is the development of a new quality control device and method suitable to provide quality assurance of large 3D printed soft tissue scaffolds.
Alignment within M3D Innovation:
  1. Application of multiscale imaging.
  2. Overlap with other projects that require a quality control within their additive manufacturing process.
Approach:
  1. Evaluation of quality control (QC) metric.
  2. Definition of parameters and acceptable margins.
  3. Market analysis of current non-destructive optical and acoustical systems that could be used to perform QC.
  4. Development of an automated/semi-automated image analysis algorithm to perform QC.
  5. Evaluation of QC parameter: time, cost, accuracy.
  6. Development of Quality Assurance (QA) Protocol using novel QC system.
  7. Implementation of novel QA system in current BellaSeno’s QMS.
Key Milestones:
  1. Evaluation of the quality control metric for breast implants.
  2. Development of a novel non-destructive QC method.
  3. Implementation of the QC system.