New voxel printing service for volume EM data
Voxel printing can show a much truer representation of your data by printing every single voxel in your dataset, rather than just a surface as is customary for 3D printing. This novel 3-D printing technique was first reported by Bader et al. in their paper Making data matter: Voxel printing for the digital fabrication of data across scales and domains.
The data processing workflow in illustrated below: (A) Initial volumetric data from which an external enclosure is generated in (B). (C) Layers are generated and processed in parallel. (D) Here, a voxel intersecting a layer is shown and (E) for each pixel within a given layer, its position information is used to find interpolated values for per-pixel material data from the surrounding voxel. (F) Material information is dithered into binary material deposition descriptions.
Bader et al., Sci. Adv. 2018;4: eaas8652
Some volume datasets which are homogeneous (i.e. densely packed neuropil) will benefit more from segmentation than viewing the volume in this way. Printing segmented datasets as a surface is nothing new, but printing inside a transparent block allows for multiple / nested segmentations and for even the finest details and unsupported structures to be preserved.
Voxel printing of SBF-SEM dataset of squid skin chromatophore. Left side is volume rendering. Right side is 3D print (size 105 x 28 x 43 mm).
Print Gallery
Stratasys J750 multi-material Pantone colour 3D printer
Maximum print size: 490 x 390 x 200 mm
Minimum layer thickness: 14 microns
Voxel size 43 x 43 x 14 microns
How to start?
Just send us the image stack and how you want it to look in a 3D colour rendering with colour information. We will then process it with our colour dithering algorithm to convert them to a printable file format and send it to print.
Prices are based on print size. Here are some examples:
1 x 1 x 1 cm - £70
3 x 3 x 3 cm - £190
5 x 5 x 5 cm - £550