Development of stent strut pattern for cerebral aneurysm

Background and purpose: Stent implantation (stenting) in intracranial arteries is termed as endovascular treatment. The number of such cases has been increasing worldwide because the surgical damage resulting from stenting seem to be less than that of other treatments. The role of stenting for cerebral aneurysms is to reduce the blood flow speed in cerebral aneurysms. We have developed a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) system using a realistic stent and blood vessel and have studied the effect of the stent. Results of our study showed the stent strut pattern and stenting position to be very effective for reducing the blood flow speed in cerebral aneurysms. We have in describe the designing method used to design the stent strut pattern which reduces both the blood flow speed and the wall shear stress (WSS). Methods: An idealized aneurysm, a parent artery, and various stent shapes were used. The shape of the parent artery was a straight pipe and the aneurysm was a sphere. The stent was implanted in the neck of the aneurysm. The porosity remained of 80%, and the width of the stent strut ranged from 90 to 160[μm]. The stent strut height was fixed at a constant 150 [μm]. For the constructed shape data, a tetrahedron numerical mesh was generated. Calculation using the finite volume method was performed by a commercial solver. The optimization method was applied to the CFD results, and the stent strut patterns that reduced the blood flow speed and the WSS most were determined. Conclusion: The development method of stent strut pattern was proposed. Various stent strut patterns to reduce blood flow speed and WSS in/on cerebral aneurysm were tested. The stent strut pattern that reduced the blood flow speed and that reduced the WSS were determined. In the future works, the number of CFD cases should be increased and the optimal stent strut pattern determined.