Abstract
Three-dimensional (3D) bio-printing, a technology to create 3D tissue through layer-by-layer approach, offers great capacity to engineer tissue with desired cells, growth factors and biomaterial scaffolds in spatial patterns to mimic the native tissue architecture. With its flexibility and power, the 3D bio-printing technology can also be used to control stem cell fate and creating 3D stem cell niches. Meanwhile, 3D bio-printed tissues often incorporate thick opaque scaffold, dense population of cells, and are often large in size (1–100 mm). Thus, there are significant difficulties in visualizing the biological events within thick tissue constructs using current microscopic techniques. To elucidate the interaction of stem cells with the microenvironment in tissue engineering applications, it is necessary to develop novel molecular imaging techniques to non-invasively observe stem cell fate, cell-cell interactions, and structural features of an engineered tissue in real time. In this chapter, we review the usage of bio-printing technologies in stem cell and tissue engineering application, and the most recent development in the optical molecular imaging techniques for thick tissue imaging.
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