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Abstract Lattice structures exhibit unique properties including a large surface area and a highly distributed load-path. This makes them very effective in engineering applications where weight reduction, thermal dissipation, and energy absorption are critical. Furthermore, with the advent of additive manufacturing (AM), lattice structures are now easier to fabricate. However, due to inherent surface complexity, their geometric construction can pose significant challenges. A classic strategy for constructing lattice structures exploits analytic surface–surface intersection; this, however, lacks robustness and scalability. An alternate strategy is voxel mesh-based isosurface extraction. While this is robust and scalable, the surface quality is mesh-dependent, and the triangulation will require significant postdecimation. A third strategy relies on explicit geometric stitching where tessellated open cylinders are stitched together through a series of geometric operations. This was demonstrated to be efficient and scalable, requiring no postprocessing. However, it was limited to lattice structures with uniform beam radii. Furthermore, existing algorithms rely on explicit convex-hull construction which is known to be numerically unstable. In this paper, a combinatorial stitching strategy is proposed where tessellated open cylinders of arbitrary radii are stitched together using topological operations. The convex hull construction is handled through a simple and robust projection method, avoiding expensive exact-arithmetic calculations and improving the computational efficiency. This is demonstrated through several examples involving millions of triangles. On a typical eight-core desktop, the proposed algorithm can construct approximately up to a million cylinders per second. 

Cerebral aneurysm clips are biomedical implants applied by neurosurgeons to re-approximate arterial vessel walls and prevent catastrophic aneurysmal hemorrhages in patients. Current methods of aneurysm clip production are labor intensive and time-consuming, leading to high costs per implant and limited variability in clip morphology. Metal additive manufacturing is investigated as an alternative to traditional manufacturing methods that may enable production of patient-specific aneurysm clips to account for variations in individual vascular anatomy and possibly reduce surgical complication risks. Relevant challenges to metal additive manufacturing are investigated for biomedical implants, including material choice, design limitations, postprocessing, printed material properties, and combined production methods. Initial experiments with additive manufacturing of 316 L stainless steel aneurysm clips are carried out on a selective laser melting (SLM) system. The dimensions of the printed clips were found to be within 0.5% of the dimensions of the designed clips. Hardness and density of the printed clips (213 ± 7 HV1 and 7.9 g/cc, respectively) were very close to reported values for 316 L stainless steel, as expected. No ferrite and minimal porosity is observed in a cross section of a printed clip, with some anisotropy in the grain orientation. A clamping force of approximately 1 N is measured with a clip separation of 1.5 mm. Metal additive manufacturing shows promise for use in the creation of custom aneurysm clips, but some of the challenges discussed will need to be addressed before clinical use is possible.