In Vivo Porcine Aged Deep Vein Thrombosis Model for Testing Ultrasound-based Thrombolysis Techniques

As blood clots age, many thrombolytic techniques become less effective. To fully evaluate these techniques for potential clinical use, a large animal aged-clot model is needed. Previous minimally invasive attempts to allow clots to age in an in vivo large animal model were unsuccessful because of the clot clearance associated with relatively high level of cardiac health of readily available research pigs. Prior models have thus subsequently used invasive surgical techniques with the associated morbidity, animal stress and cost. We propose a method for forming sub-acute venous blood clots in an in-vivo porcine model. The age of the clots can be controlled and varied. By using an intravenous scaffold to anchor the clot to the vessel wall during the aging process, we can show that sub-acute clots can consistently be formed with a minimally invasive, percutaneous approach. The clot formed in this study remained intact for at least 1 wk in all subjects. Therefore, we established a new minimally invasive, large animal aged-clot model for evaluation of thrombolytic techniques.