title: Fabrication and Optimal Design of Biodegradable Polymeric Stents for Aneurysms Treatments.
abstract: An aneurysm is a balloon-like bulge in the wall of blood vessels, occurring in major arteries of the heart and brain. Biodegradable polymeric stent-assisted coiling is expected to be the ideal treatment of wide-neck complex aneurysms. This paper presents the development of methods to fabricate and optimally design biodegradable polymeric stents for aneurysms treatment. Firstly, a dispensing-based rapid prototyping (DBRP) system was developed to fabricate coil and zigzag structures of biodegradable polymeric stents. Then, compression testing was carried out to characterize the radial deformation of the stents fabricated with the coil or zigzag structure. The results illustrated the stent with a zigzag structure has a stronger radial stiffness than the one with a coil structure. On this basis, the stent with a zigzag structure was chosen for the development of a finite element model for simulating the real compression tests. The result showed the finite element model of biodegradable polymeric stents is acceptable within a range of radial deformation around 20%. Furthermore, the optimization of the zigzag structure was performed with ANSYS DesignXplorer, and the results indicated that the total deformation could be decreased by 35.7% by optimizing the structure parameters, which would represent a significant advance of the radial stiffness of biodegradable polymeric stents.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A9, Canada. hax538@mail.usask.ca.
authors.forename: Xue
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Han
authors.affiliation: Division of Biomedical Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A9, Canada. wuxiayunxin@126.com.
authors.forename: Xia
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurosurgery, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A9, Canada. m.kelly@usask.ca.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kelly
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A9, Canada. xbc719@mail.usask.com.|Division of Biomedical Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A9, Canada. xbc719@mail.usask.com.
authors.forename: Xiongbiao
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Chen
keywords: biodegradable polymeric stents; fabrication; optimization; radial stiffness; simulation