Kuang presents ultrasound printing work at NIH campus

Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Xiao Kuang presented his ultrasound printing research to congressional staff at the National Institutes of Health campus in August 2024.

Kuang and graduate student Ziwen Wang worked with collaborators from Duke and Harvard to give a presentation and live technical demonstration of their innovative ultrasound printing technique, called deep-penetration acoustic volumetric printing, which enables 3D printing inside the body. The technique has potential applications for minimally invasive surgery.

The technique involves a special kind of polymer ink that can be injected into the body; the ink responds to ultrasound by transforming from liquid to solid. Kuang and his collaborators also developed an ultrasound 3D printer using a focused ultrasound transducer so they could precisely focus the ultrasound waves. By combining these two technologies, Kuang focused the ultrasound energy to quickly solidify the polymer ink and build a custom structure inside of materials that scatter light—including under centimeters-thick tissue.

“Unlike other 3D-printing methods that build an object layer by layer and the prevalent light-based printing technique that needs optical transparent inks, our technique enables scanning and directly ‘writing’ inside the material to volumetrically build complex structures,” says Kuang, who detailed the new technique in a paper published in the journal Science in December 2023.

Read more about Kuang, who joined the UW-Madison Department of Mechanical Engineering in August 2024.