Opto-mechanical Characterization Methods to Understand Physical and Mechanical Properties of Bioengineered Tissue

Castro Carrion, Westly

Etd

Opto-mechanical Characterization Methods to Understand Physical and Mechanical Properties of Bioengineered Tissue

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Availability of new biological materials has opened the possibility of realizing new fabrication processes to manufacture functional biological tissues at large scales. However, all of the fabricated tissues require extensive and detailed characterization, including morphology and shape, internal and external structure, composition, etc., in order to ensure their reliability and functionality. Typically, characterization is performed by chemical and visual testing methods that are time consuming, have low-precision, and require sample preparation. In this thesis, noninvasive optical methodologies are developed and applied to the characterization of specific bioengineered tissues. An Air Puffing Fringe Projection (APFP) system is been developed to noninvasively measure force-displacement responses of tissues at the microscale; the resulting data obtained with APFP are used to recover elastic properties. Digital Holography (DH) was applied to noninvasively measure, in full-field of view, tissue deformations under acoustic excitations at the nanoscale; the results show that DH can effectively perform measurements of dynamic deformations in real-time. To investigate the relationship between internal and surface characteristics of tissues and to correlate them with force and deformations measurements obtained with APFP and DH, Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and White-Light Interferometry (WLI) were applied; the data obtained with OCT and WLI are used to obtain corresponding 3D reconstructions at the microscale. It is shown that because of the magnitude and the amount of data generated by these testing methods, model driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods may be required in order to effectively understand the relationship between internal and external properties of bioengineered tissues and to provide data to enhance fabrication parameters and processes.

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