Evaluation Of Morphology, Structure, And Performance Of Polysulfone Asymmetric Hollow Fiber Membrane For Hepatocytes Culture

Over the years, to save the lives of the people who suffered from liver failure, many researchers have been working toward the development of the extracorporeal artificial liver devices, aiming at offering a "bridging" treatment for patients waiting liver transplantation or the recovery of their own liver. Bioreactor is the key part of an extracorporeal artificial liver device and its function affects the effect and the efficiency of the device a lot. Among the numerous bioreactors, hollow fiber bioreactor is one of the most studied and used bioreactors. However, traditional hollow fiber bioreactor has some shortage, such as a lower membrane flux, lower conglutinate growth rate of hepatocytes, and so on, which failed to meet clinic demands. To overcome these shortages, we prepared a kind of asymmetric polysulfone (PSF) hollow fiber membrane with a single skin and big pore size (0.7 μ m) to specifically culture hepatocytes, based on the studies on hollow fiber membrane in the past few years. The goal of this thesis is to establish a fundamental evaluation method for the characterization of the structure and performance of the hollow fiber membrane to improve the conglutinate growth and distribution of hepatocytes on the PSF hollow fiber membrane for the next step.