EXPERIMENTAL AND COMPUTATIONAL STUDY ON THE EFFECTS OF FLOW DISRUPTIONS CAUSED BY STENTING AND IT’S IMPACT ON ACUTE STENT THROMBOSIS

Abstract

Coronary stenting is the gold standard treatment of coronary artery disease. Stent thrombosis is a fatal complication of coronary stenting and is often associated with death or myocardial infarction. This study uses an in vitro benchtop flow perfusion model to study the impact of stent design, stenting techniques and bifurcation stenting on acute stent thrombogenicity. Experimental results show a correlation between strut thickness and improper stent deployment with increase stent thrombogenicity in single vessel models. In bifurcation models, using a bifurcation dedicated stent design and opening the side branch reduced acute stent thrombogenicity. No significant difference in acute thrombogenicity was observed between a main branch first and side branch first bifurcation double stenting technique. Computational fluid dynamic models created based on the in vitro experiments showed that larger measured thrombus formed experimentally was correlated to higher predicted shear rate values from the computational models.