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Tissue Engineering
Head: Lee Weiss

Mailing address:
MRT Center
The Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890
(412) 268 6553 (Jim Osborn, Executive Director)
(412) 268 6436 (FAX)

Associated center: MRTC

For more information, see this lab's homepage.

This page last updated - January 1999.

Tissue Engineering is a multidisciplinary field that applies the principles of biology and engineering to develop tissue substitutes to restore, maintain, or improve the function of diseased or damaged human tissues. One approach for engineering tissue involves seeding biodegradable scaffolds with donor cells and/or growth factors, then culturing and implanting the scaffolds to induce and direct the growth of new, healthy tissue.

The need for bone substitutes is particularly important. Bone substitutes are often required to help repair or replace damaged or diseased tissues in cases ranging from trauma, to congenital and degenerative diseases, to cancer, to cosmetics. Our vision for creating tissue engineered bone is an advanced CAD/CAM (computer-aided-design/computer-aided-manufacturing) bioreactor system capable of growing large-scale, customized bone substitutes as depicted in the figure above. Our current research involves not only laying the foundation for several of the components required for realizing such an advanced system, but also gaining knowledge and developing components that will have clinical relevance in the nearer term.

Name - Title <Email Address>
• Phil Campbell - Visiting Research Scientist
• [Home] Kaigham Gabriel - Professor, RI/ECE <kgabriel@ece.cmu.edu>
• Prashant Kumta - Associate Professor, MSE <kumta+@cmu.edu>
• [Home] Kang Li - PhD Student, ECE <kangl@cmu.edu>
• Eric Miller - PhD Student, Bio Med <edmiller@andrew.cmu.edu>
• Mark Mooney - Associate Professor
• Lawrence Schultz - Senior Research Engineer <schultz+@cs.cmu.edu>
• John Wahlig, M.D. -

• Cell Tracking - We are developing fully-automated computer vision-based cell tracking algorithms and a system that automatically determines the spatiotemporal history of dense populations of cells over extended period of time.

• Cell Population Tracking and Lineage Construction Using Multiple-Model Dynamics Filters and Spatiotemporal Optimization
  K. Li and T. Kanade
  Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Microscopic Image Analysis with Applications in Biology (MIAAB), September, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [789 KB] copyrighted

• Cell Population Tracking and Lineage Construction with Spatiotemporal Context
  K. Li, M. Chen, and T. Kanade
  Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2007, pp. 295 - 302. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [1866 KB] copyrighted

• Online Tracking of Migrating and Proliferating Cells Imaged with Phase-Contrast Microscopy
  K. Li, E. Miller, L. Weiss, P. Campbell, and T. Kanade
  Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop (CVPRW '06), June, 2006, pp. 65 - 72. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [600 KB] copyrighted

• Tracking of Migrating and Proliferating Cells in Phase-Contrast Microscopy Imagery for Tissue Engineering
  T. Kanade and K. Li
  Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Computer Vision for Biomedical Image Applications (CVBIA), October, 2005, pp. 24. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [72 KB] copyrighted

• Rabbit Calvarial Wound Healing Using Seeded Caprotite Scaffolds
  M. Mooney, J. Calvert, J.O. Hollinger, K. Marra, L. Weiss, P. Campbell, P. Kumta, and S. Bidic
  Journal of Dental Research, Vol. 82, No. 2, 2003, pp. 131 - 135.

• Prototype Implemtation of an Assembly System for Tissue Engineered Constructs
  M. Reischmann, R. Merz, L. Schultz, and L. Weiss
  Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik, July, 2002, pp. 248 - 252.

• Tissue Engineering: Solid Freeform Fabrication of Scaffolds
  L. Weiss
  Science & Medicine, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2002, pp. 6 - 7.

• Solid Freeform Fabrication of Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering
  L. Weiss
  Science & Medicine, 2001.

• Characterization of osteoblast-like behavior of cultured bone marrow stromal cells on various polymer surfaces
  J.W. Calvert, K.G. Marra, L. Cook, P.N. Kumta, P.A. DiMilla, and L. Weiss
  J. Biomed. Mat. Res., Vol. 52, No. 2, 2000, pp. 279 - 284.

• Modification of the Degradation of Polymer/Ceramic Scaffolds
  A.S. Dunn, P.G. Campbell, L. Weiss, and K.G. Marra
  J. Materials Science: Materials in Medicine, 2000.