In Vitro Coronary Stent Implantation: Vessel Wall-Stent Interaction

This study was designed to assess the biomechanical interactions between the coronary artery wall and intracoronary stents following implantation in vitro. Balloon expandable stent was deployed in vitro into the sample of the left anterior descending coronary artery of a 67 years old female with multiple atherosclerotic lesions. The stent was selected to match approximately the internal diameter of the healthy segment of the target artery. The stent implantation procedure was recorded with CCD camera. Digital images were subsequently processed with the edge detector based on Canny algorithm. Obtained coordinates of the surface contours were used in the deformation analysis. For the sake of simplicity the deformation was considered as the ratio between the distances of deformed and reference contour points at the same longitudinal position. We found that the stent expansion induced significant over-stretching of the external coronary artery. We have concluded that optical tracking of the external surface of the artery during the stent deployment provides sufficiently accurate deformation analysis potentially useful in the assessment of biomechanical interactions during intracoronary stenting.