Improving Stents - Part 2

Stents are expandable tubes that are inserted into blocked or
damaged blood vessels. They offer a practical way to treat coronary
artery disease, repairing vessels and keeping them open so that
blood can flow freely. When stents work, they are a great
alternative to radical surgery, but they can deteriorate or become
dislodged. Mathematical models of blood vessels and stents are
helping to determine better shapes and materials for the tubes.
These models are so accurate that the FDA is considering requiring
mathematical modeling in the design of stents before any further
testing is done, to reduce the need for expensive experimentation.
Precise modeling of the entire human vascular system is far beyond
the reach of current computational power, so researchers focus
their detailed models on small subsections, which are coupled with
simpler models of the rest of the system. The Navier-Stokes
equations are used to represent the flow of blood and its
interaction with vessel walls. A mathematical proof was the central
part of recent research that led to the abandonment of one type of
stent and the design of better ones. The goal now is to create
better computational fluid-vessel models and stent models to
improve the treatment and prediction of coronary artery disease the
major cause of heart attacks. For More Information: Design of
Optimal Endoprostheses Using Mathematical Modeling, Canic, Krajcer,
and Lapin, Endovascular Today, May 2006.