Solidworks

A twelve spots aluminium build platform (aluminium ₁₂BP) was designed using SolidWorks (Dassault Systèmes, Vélizy-Villacoublay, France), based on the design of the 3D printed prototype, manufactured through computer numerical control (CNC) milling and finally bead blasted to provide a rough finishing aimed to increase objects’ adherence while printing and to facilitate their release once fabricated; the support fixing the build platform to the SLA apparatus was designed using TinkerCAD and 3D printed with clear resin photopolymer.

The incubating device for the porous microplate was designed using a CAD software (Solidworks, Dassault Systèmes) and the exported drawing files were used to laser cut 1/4'' and 1/8'' acrylic sheet (Universal Laser Systems; Supplementary Fig. S2). After washing the cut acrylic parts with deionized water, they were attached by acrylic (Weld-On) and epoxy (3 M) adhesives that were followed by a curing process for ~18 h. Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) (Sylgard 184, Dow Corning) was cast onto the acrylic mold and cured at 80 °C for at least 3 h. The PDMS mold was carefully detached from the acrylic surface by dispensing isopropyl alcohol (VWR) into the area between the PDMS and the acrylic molds (Fig. 2a).Fig. 2

a Procedure to build a porous microplate using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and acrylic molds. b Image of the microplate with an array of culture wells (wall thickness: 0.9 mm). c Scanning electron microscopy image of nanoporous copolymer HEMA–EDMA.

The test samples were designed as 3D solid models in SolidWorks (Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp., Waltham, MA, USA). The design was made using available medical materials to replicate the actual hip implant stem model. The model was then saved as an .stl file using Magics software with the appropriate accuracy. The .stl file consisted of 424,550 triangles and had a linear accuracy combined with angular accuracy of +/−0.01 mm. The accuracy was selected in such a way so as to allow the .stl file to be processed by further 3D printer software. By writing the .stl with excessive accuracy, the machine’s internal software was unable to process the file further, so the accuracy remained at the presented level. Figure 2 presents a view of the CAD model and a view of the characteristic locations shown in Materialise Magics 23.0.0.289 (Leuven, Belgium).

The normal idealized AAA model referenced from the present study (Qiao et al., 2022 (link)) was constructed using commercial software (Solidworks; Dassault Systemes S.A, Suresnes, France), and the aneurysm was below the level of renal arteries, as shown in Figure 1A. The diameter of the aneurysm was set to 3 cm and 5cm, representing the minimum size of the aneurysm and the minimum size that requiring surgical treatment, respectively. In order to investigate the effect of arterial curvature on aneurysms, the bending angle of the curvature model was set at 30°. In addition, to explore the effect of aneurysm eccentricity, the eccentric model was set as the aneurysm was tangent to the aorta. The artery structure at the inlet has an diameter of 20 mm, which is the typical size of a healthy aortic structure (Salman et al., 2019 (link)). Other parameters of idealized models, such as branch diameter, branch position, and branch angle, were absorbed from anatomical data or other literature (Kaewchoothong et al., 2022 (link); Qiao et al., 2022 (link)). Therefore, 10 idealized model were conducted hemodynamic simulation in this study, as shown in Figure 1B. The diameters of aorta inlet and branch outlet were shown in Table1.

The corneal model reconstruction method proposed in this work is shown in Figure 1. Briefly, its procedure can be explained as follows: source data from the optical tomography are entered, after data conversion, into a script called “corneaga.m” run under Matlab software. The script uses ga function of the genetic algorithm to obtain the optimal parameters of the modal fit of the corneal surface to an implicit equation. Once the reconstruction parameters are obtained, the surface is graphically represented within the Matlab environment and can then be exported as a mesh. Additionally, the morpho-geometric parameters of the reconstructed cornea and the goodness of fit are obtained using their mean squared error (MSE). The obtained surface can be graphically represented and analyzed using CAD software such as Rhinoceros (version 7.0; McNeil Inc., NJ, USA) or Solidworks (version 2022; Dassault Systèmes, Vélizy-Villacoublay, France). In Figure 1 below, all the executed phases are shown in detail.

The aortic root model design was guided by idealized dimensions suggested by Thubrikar (1990) whereby setting the basis for the computer aided (CAD) design of the aortic root 3D model. In Solidworks (Dassault Systèmes, Vélizy-Villacoublay, France), the model was designed comprising a 25 mm cylinder representing the aortic wall, with the addition of three sinus structures with dimensions listed in Supplementary Figure S1. A two-part model was developed representing the ascending aorta and sinuses (1) and left ventricular side (2) to allow for easy removal of the scaffold from the mandrel (Supplementary Figure S1). The aortic root model was scaled down to 20, 15, and 10 mm to fabricate models over a range of relevant anatomies, highlighting the scalability of this fabrication platform.