In vitro study of the deployment performance of 3D printed stents in the diseased artery with the lipid arterial plaques

Atherosclerotic plaque is one of the arterial diseases which builds up in the arterial wall and can be identified by the composition of the plaque. Atherosclerosis causes the narrowing or occlusions of the arterial lumen leading to cardiovascular event. Percutaneous (keyhole) endovascular stenting has become the most common revascularisation method due to its minimum invasive nature and low complication rate. The stents, mostly fabricated by laser machines, have uniform geometries which are not ideal to treat the diseased arteries with lesion-specific properties. In addition, the effect of arterial plaque compositions on the performance of stents is not fully investigated. In this study, the deployment performance of the stents with the varied design, made of the 316L stainless steel and fabricated by additive manufacturing (AM) technology, were investigated. An in vitro experiment was conducted to test the influence of the atherosclerotic plaque compositions at 55% stenosis on the commercial and AM fabricated stents. Two artificial plaques (lipid and calcified) were prepared manually, and their mechanical testing were conducted using an unconfined compression test. Two types of stents, printed and commercial stents, were used to treat the diseased artificial artery, and the data of the pressure and diameter were collected simultaneously when the stent inflation pressure was applied. The results show that the mechanical property of the artificial lipid plaques was very similar to the real lipid plaque that observed from clinical study. From the deployment performance test for these two types of stents, it was observed that as the pressure inside of balloon increases, the diameters measured at the external wall of the artificial artery also increase when the pressure is above 4 atm. Overall, there is a close linear relationship between pressure and arterial wall movement with lipid plaque in both printed and commercial stents though that the stent made of AM technology is less flexible and has lower elastic property than the commercial one.