Design and fabrication of a mechanically matched vascular graft.

ABSTRACT

The study provides a pathway to design a mechanics-matching vascular graft for an end-to-end anastomosis to a host artery. For functional equivalence, we submit that the graft and a host artery should have equal inner deformed diameters, equal pressure-radius module, and experience equal axial forces when subjected to mean arterial pressure. These criteria for mechanical equivalence are valid for a large class of materials that can be considered as elastic incompressible and orthotropic solids. As an example, specific known artery properties were used to design or select a graft made from a new synthetic biomaterial to demonstrate that reliable and robust technology for graft fabrication is possible.