Development of a Computational Framework for the Evaluation of Biodegradable Cerebral Stents with Enhanced Bending Performance

Cerebral aneurysm disease has extremely high mortality and morbidity, which can be efficiently treated by implanting a vascular stent. However, due to relatively poor flexibility and biodegradability, current vascular stents still cause some life-threatening complications. Thus, it is of great significance to develop new biodegradable cerebral stents (BCSs) with enhanced flexibility for improving the prognosis of cerebral aneurysm disease. In this work, a flexibility-enhanced BCS architecture has been investigated and designed. Both numerical simulation and experiments have been performed to demonstrate the potential clinical application of the proposed BCSs. First, the effects of the structural parameters on the flexibility have been analyzed by finite element simulation. Then, the mechanical properties of the proposed BCSs have been characterized via both numerical simulation and experiments and compared to those of two representative commercial stents for demonstrating the flexibility and radial stiffness of the proposed design. The knowledge from this work provides a new design methodology.