Determination of the Influence of Strut Connector on Stent Deployment

Coronary artery stents are tubular structures employed together with angioplasty. Stented angioplasty is a clinical procedure widely applied in the treatment of atherosclerosis to reopen the blocked artery. It is a simple and fast curing minimally invasive clinical procedure. However, it is essential to understand the expansion characteristics of a stent before implantation since the stent geometry, inflating pressure, etc., influence the performance of stents. Finite element analysis and in vitro experiments are simultaneously employed before clinical testing to predict the characteristics during deployment. In this paper, the expansion and deployment characteristics of Meril Osum 2.75 × 24 coronary stent and Envision 3.5 × 28 stent were investigated to study the influence of strut connector on the expansion behaviour of the stent by experimental and computational methods. The current study analyzes the real-time deployment characteristics such as rate of expansion, stress on stent, recoil, dog boning, and foreshortening. The stent expansion characteristics obtained from experiments and simulations were found matching and observed that strut connector has a significant effect on stent expansion. Further, the curved connector of small radius of curvature shows better performance with high patency rate.