At the
Institute of Anatomy of the University of Bern in Switzerland, we predominantly scan wet biological samples.
The scans are performed on our two machines, the SkyScan 1172 and SkyScan 1272, in a variety of settings with wide-ranging voxel sizes, sample sizes, and conditions. One thing that most samples have in common either is that they are scanned in a humidity chamber or scanned submerged in a liquid. A leakage of any liquid may damage the internals of our machines, namely when we process samples with potentially toxic or corrosive solutions like
Paraformaldehyde.
To be able to overcome these issues we compiled a library of adapted sample holders which can be printed on a 3D printer.
Using the free software
OpenSCAD we created the sample holders and exported them to STL files. Since we require the sample holders to be perfectly water (or liquid) proof, the cheapest and most common 3D printing method (
fused deposition modeling) was not suitable for our purposes. With these extrusion methods, small gaps in the 3D printed object can remain. After some testing, we chose a high-quality
stereolithography printer (
Form 2, Formlabs, Somerville, USA) to print our STL files to physical objects.
Moreover, the 3D printing enables the production of customized sample holders for several samples to be scanned simultaneously and reconstructed separately. This optimizes the use of our machines.
The image below shows some of the sample holders, the whole library of OpenSCAD and STL files is freely available at https://github.com/habi/openscad