UCLA and Bioprinting Company Aether have collaborated to work towards 3D Printed Artificial Muscles by working together to develop technologies for faster, easier fabrication of soft artificial muscles and other multi-material structures. Aether will work on optimizing the Aether 1 bioprinter and its computer vision capabilities to automate the process of 3D printing soft robotic devices, improve print quality and ease of use and has also planned to launch software that will allow users to create 3D printable organs from medical images with the push of a button in around 2019.

Canadian Researchers used 3D Printing to create Organ Models or Mannequin, called CASMER, which featured both 3D printing of almost all the organ shells, along with added packing material to flesh out the anatomy correctly. This involved four techniques: Realistic 3D printing of abdominal organs, Material-based moulding of the pancreas, Beeswax sculpting of abdominal fat and Off-the-shelf parts for the skeleton and outer shell. Muscle was made from Clear Flex® urethane rubber (Smooth-ON, PA), while fat was created from modelling beeswax. Rostock Max V2 3D printer was used, with source image data converted via segmentation software, as well as open-sourced Slicer.

Thomas Campbell and James F.X. Jones, Researchers from School of Medicine, University College Dublin, Ireland, have a created a new Open-Source 3D Printer relying on an XYZ positioning system capable of moving a sensor or probe. The latest FDM printer is run by a standard Raspberry Pi 3, incorporated with Open Computer Vision Library (OpenCV), Arduino Mega, RAMPS 1.4 motor shield, and NEMA17 bipolar stepper motors and approximately cost around $670.20. The applications include: Automated Microscopy Script that links seamlessly with image stitching plugins in ImageJ (Fiji) allowing the user to create high resolution montages application of graded rates of stretch to muscle spindles, a component of reflexes in our human body.