• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.29 no.9 s.240
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• pp.1042-1048
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• 2005

Numerical investigation has been made on the stent design to minimize the neointimal hyperplasia. Computational fluid dynamics is applied to investigate the flow distributions in the immediate vicinity of the given idealized stent implanted in the blood vessel. Parametric study on the variations of the number of stouts, stent diameters, stent spacings and Reynolds numbers has been conducted using axi-symmetric Navier-Stokes equations. An initial difficulty in the study is to determine the optimal stent design to understand the flow physics of the flow disturbance induced by stent. The size of recirculation zone around stent is depend on the stent diameter, number of stent wire and Reynolds number but is insensitive to the stent wire spacing. It is also found that when the flow is in acceleration, the flow sees a more favorable pressure gradient, and the separation zones are smaller than the steady flow case. When the flow is in deceleration and the flow sees a more adverse pressure gradient so that the separation zones are larger.

• Journal of the Korean Ceramic Society
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• v.44 no.7
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• pp.362-367
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• 2007

Stent is a tiny structure made with either ceramic coating and/or bare metal. Being approximately $1{\sim}2 mm$ in diameter, it consists of holes, slots, or void space and is designed to cover entire medical lesions. Stent implantation into patients' arteries has been practiced for a little more than a decade in order to widen the blocked artery. The adoption of the stent has significantly improved the efficacy when compared with the previous medical practice by balloon angioplasty alone. Yet better biomedical performance of the stent is being demanded in order to eliminate the still existing problem of artery restenosis, which means the artery becomes narrowed again. Recent literature survey shows researches on ceramic coatings onto the stent surface, or material design to improve the mechanical response of the stent. This study focuses more on the material design and mechanical analysis. The results showed that the void configuration within the stent affects the mechanical response significantly. The rectangular shape was found to yield expansion at a relatively lower pressure than the elliptical slot for a slotted tube stent. The present results, when combined with research on coating at the stent surface, may provide stents with improved bio-medical performance.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.103-108
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• 2012

Restenosis symptom, which is well known as a problem of stents, is due to the recoil and expansion pressure depending on shapes of stent. In order to reduce the effect of recoil problem, study on pattern and shape for the stent is required and the expansion pressure and recoil should be evaluated. This paper aims at evaluating mechanical characteristics of stent used in surgery for vessel stenosis. The expansion process of coronary artery stent in vessel for two models including the Cypher$^{(R)}$ from Johnson & Johnson$^{TM}$ and a suggested model were simulated using the Finite Element Analysis. Comparison of the directional recoil simulation results was made. The issues in the deformed shape of vessel and recoil of Cypher$^{(R)}$ were partially resolved in the suggested model. Therefore, the shape design suggested in this paper was able to reduce the restenosis symptom.

• Journal of Digestive Cancer Research
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.92-98
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• 2022

Self-expandable metal stent (SEMS) is effective for biliary drainage, especially in pancreaticobiliary cancer. The mechanical properties, material, and design of SEMS are important in preventing recurrent biliary obstruction and complication. Radial and chronic expansion forces play roles in preventing stent migration and collapse. Complications, such as stent impaction, cholecystitis, and pancreatitis, were related to the axial force. The nickel-titanium alloy shows more flexibility, conformability, and optimal axial force compared to previously used stainless steel. Additionally, the stent structure affected the mechanical properties of SEMS. Therefore, understanding the mechanical properties, material, and design of SEMS will provide the best outcome for biliary drainage, as well as better SEMS development.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.1-15
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• 2011

Cerebral aneurysm is common lesion among adult population. Current methods for treating the disease have several limitations. Inspired by fern leaves, we have developed a new stent, called leaf stent, which can provide a tailored coverage at the neck of an aneurysm and thus prevent the blood from entering the aneurysm. It alone can be used to treat the cerebral aneurysm and therefore overcomes problems existing in current treating methods. The paper focuses on the numerical simulation of the leaf stents. The mechanical behaviour of the stent in various designs has been investigated using the finite element method. It has been found that certain designs provide adequate radial force and have excellent longitudinal flexibility. The performance of certain leaf stents is comparable and even superior to those of the commercially available cerebral stents such as the Neuroform stent and the Enterprise stent, commonly used for stent assisted coiling, while at the same time, providing sufficient coverage to isolate the aneurysm without using coils.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.601-607
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• 2012

In this study, we performed computational fluid dynamic simulations to explore how the detailed design of drug-eluting stents affects both the flow field in the vicinity of the stent as well as the concentration of the eluted drug at the endothelial cell surface. Simulations were performed on three idealized stent geometries we developed and on geometries approximating three commercial stents,: Medtronic's Aurora stent, Cordis's BX Velocity stent, and Boston Scientific's Wallstent. An important contribution of the present study is the introduction of the stent effectiveness index (EI), which provides a quantitative assessment of stent performance and an objective basis for comparing the performance of different stents. Among the three commercial stents studied, our simulations have revealed that the BX Velocity stent is associated with the lowest in-stent EI values for the range of flow Reynolds numbers studied ($200{\leq}Re{\leq}800$). In addition to commercial stent designs, we investigated the EI in three idealized stents and determined that a spiral stent provides excellent performance (low EI) under all flow conditions investigated.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.915-922
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• 2004

A stent is small tube-like structure expanded into stenotic arteries to restore blood flow. The stent expansion behaviors define the effectiveness of the surgical operation. In this paper, finite-element method was employed to analyze expansion behaviors and fatigue life of a typical diamond-shaped balloon-expandable stent. Beyond safety considerations, this type of analysis provides mechanical properties that are often difficult to obtain by experiments. Mechanical properties of the stent expansion pressure, radial recoil, longitudinal recoil and foreshortening were simulated using commercial FEM code, ANSYS and fatigue life were estimated using NISAII ENDURE. The FEM results showed that the pressures necessary to expand the stent up to a diameter of 3mm, 4mm and 5mm were 0.75MPa, 0.82MPa and 0.97MPa. The fatigue lifes according to expansion diameter were 114${\times}$10$^{7}$cycles, 714${\times}$$^{6}$cycles and 163${\times}$10$^{6}$cycles. As a result, a finite element model used in this study can simulate expansion behaviors of stents and should be useful to design new stents or analyze actual stents.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.11
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• pp.1-6
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• 2017

Stents are widely used as the most common method of treating coronary artery disease with implants in the form of a metal mesh. The blood flow is normalized by inserting a stent into the narrowed or clogged areas of the human body. In this study, the mechanical characteristics of a stent are investigated according to the variations of its design parameters by the Taguchi method and finite element analysis. A stent model of the Palmaz-Schatz type was used for the analysis. In the analysis, an elasto-plastic material model was adopted for the stent and a hyper-elastic model was used for the balloon. The main interest of this study is to investigate the effects of the design parameters which reduce the possibility of restenosis by adjusting the recoil amount. A Taguchi orthogonal array was constructed on the model of the stent. The thickness and length and angle of the slot were selected as the design parameters. The amounts of radial recoil and longitudinal recoil were calculated by finite element analysis. The statistical analysis using the Taguchi method showed that optimizing the shape of the stent could reduce the possibility of restenosis. The optimized shape showed improvements of recoil in the radial and longitudinal directions of ~1% and ~0.1%, respectively, compared to the default model.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.246-255
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• 2022

Objective: To determine the usefulness of Silent MR angiography (MRA) for evaluating intracranial aneurysms treated with stent-assisted coil embolization. Materials and Methods: Ninety-nine patients (101 aneurysms) treated with stent-assisted coil embolization (Neuroform atlas, 71 cases; Enterprise, 17; LVIS Jr, 9; and Solitaire AB, 4 cases) underwent time-of-flight (TOF) MRA and Silent MRA in the same session using a 3T MRI system within 24 hours of embolization. Two radiologists independently interpreted both MRA images retrospectively and rated the image quality using a 5-point Likert scale. The image quality and diagnostic accuracy of the two modalities in the detection of aneurysm occlusion were further compared based on the stent design and the site of aneurysm. Results: The average image quality scores of the Silent MRA and TOF MRA were 4.38 ± 0.83 and 2.78 ± 1.04, respectively (p < 0.001), with an almost perfect interobserver agreement. Silent MRA had a significantly higher image quality score than TOF MRA at the distal internal carotid artery (n = 57, 4.25 ± 0.91 vs. 3.05 ± 1.16, p < 0.001), middle cerebral artery (n = 21, 4.57 ± 0.75 vs. 2.19 ± 0.68, p < 0.001), anterior cerebral artery (n = 13, 4.54 ± 0.66 vs. 2.46 ± 0.66, p < 0.001), and posterior circulation artery (n = 10, 4.50 ± 0.71 vs. 2.90 ± 0.74, p = 0.013). Silent MRA had superior image quality score to TOF MRA in the stented arteries when using Neuroform atlas (4.66 ± 0.53 vs. 3.21 ± 0.84, p < 0.001), Enterprise (3.29 ± 1.59 vs. 1.59 ± 0.51, p = 0.003), LVIS Jr (4.33 ± 1.89 vs. 1.89 ± 0.78, p = 0.033), and Solitaire AB stents (4.00 ± 2.25 vs. 2.25 ± 0.96, p = 0.356). The interpretation of the status of aneurysm occlusion exhibited significantly higher sensitivity with Silent MRA than with TOF MRA when using the Neuroform Atlas stent (96.4% vs. 14.3%, respectively, p < 0.001) and LVIS Jr stent (100% vs. 20%, respectively, p = 0.046). Conclusion: Silent MRA can be useful to evaluate aneurysms treated with stent-assisted coil embolization, regardless of the aneurysm location and type of stent used.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.31 no.1 s.256
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• pp.21-28
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• 2007

The use of drug-eluting stents has dramatically reduced the incidence of restenosis however, much remains to be teamed about the performance of these stouts. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that the design of drug-eluting stents influences the efficacy of local drug delivery to the arterial wall and that this effect depends on both arterial geometry and the prevailing flow conditions. We performed computational simulations in which the coupled Navier-Stokes and advection-diffusion equations were solved to determine the flow field and drug concentration in the vicinity of model drug-eluting stouts It is found that the characteristics of flow phenomena can be influenced greatly by the ratio of stent diameter to vessel diameter. The presence of drug-eluting stent may have profound effect on wall shear stresses, recirculation sizes and drug distributions. The results show that recirculation zone is influenced by the imposed flow conditions and stent diameter. In pulsatile flow, the low wall shear stress and high drug concentration occur along the arterial wall during the decelerating flow conditions. These results could provide the guideline for future drug-eluting stent designs toward reducing restenosis by affecting local wall shear stress distributions associated with neointimal hyperplasia.