Laser direct writing of micro- and nano-scale medical devices

Abstract

Laser-based direct writing of materials has undergone significant development in recent years. The ability to modify a variety of materials at small length scales and using short production times provides laser direct writing with unique capabilities for fabrication of medical devices. In many laser-based rapid prototyping methods, microscale and submicroscale structuring of materials is controlled by computer-generated models. Various laser-based direct write methods, including selective laser sintering/melting, laser machining, matrix-assisted pulsed-laser evaporation direct write, stereolithography and two-photon polymerization, are described. Their use in fabrication of microstructured and nanostructured medical devices is discussed. Laser direct writing may be used for processing a wide variety of advanced medical devices, including patient-specific prostheses, drug delivery devices, biosensors, stents and tissue-engineering scaffolds.

3D Printed Scaffolds as a New Perspective for Bone Tissue Regeneration: Literature Review

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Single Pulse Multiphoton Fabrication of Photopolymerized Periodic Structures Using Vortex Beams

“…By careful choice of the laser intensity with respect to the multiphoton polymerization threshold, spatial resolution better than 100 nm has been achieved [2]. Applications for these structures have been proposed in a wide variety of fields such as photonics [3], metamaterials [4] and biomedical devices [5].…”

1984 : on monitoring cell fate in three-dimensional polymeric scaffolds for tissue engineering applications

“…The field of rapid prototyp-ing includes fused deposition modeling of thermoplastic materials [93][94][95], 3D printing of pastes or liquids [96], selective laser sintering (SLS) [97][98][99][100] and stereo-lithography applied to photo-sensitive materials [101][102][103][104]. Rapid prototyping techniques gained interest because of the capability to create scaffold geometries with well-defined parameters and a high reproducibility (Figure 2.1C) [74].…”