Structural Optimisation of Vascular Stents – Development of an Ex-vivo testing platform and the Computational Framework Addressing Patient-specific Needs for Angioplasty

A PhD scholarship is available in School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, UK), supervised by Dr. Y Chen and Prof. RL Reuben, to develop an ex-vivo testing platform for angioplasty and also a computational framework that designs the stents using patient-specific data and structural optimisation techniques.

Vascular stent has become a major solution to localised flow constriction in angioplasty. Although there have been substantial successful clinical applications, the lack of structural designs based on patient-specific data is the major cause to non-otimised angioplasty outcome, including tissue damage due to non-uniform expansion of stent structure (both in radial direction, i.e. so-called ‘dog-boning effect’; and in peripheral direction caused by nonlinear tissue behaviour and complex vascular geometry) and the restenosis due to the improper physiological response of the artery to the stent. Therefore, understanding how the balloon/stent expand and interact with coronary arteries using the patient-specific data is of great importance.

An ex-vivo testing platform that mimicks the in-vivo environment will be established for angioplasty. On the completion of direct-problem modelling, structural optimisation will be used as a mathematical tool to design novel stents with optimised structure based on several criteria identified. Results from both ex-vivo experiments and mathematical modelling will be used for correlation purpose. It is expected that based on the experimental and modelling work carried out during this 3-year studentship, a unified design framework for both balloon-catheters and balloon-expandable stents can be established.

The ideal candidate should be highly-motivated. Experience in computational and/or experimental mechanics relevant to this project will be a plus.