Advisory Committee Chair
Vinoy Thomas
Advisory Committee Members
Yogesh K Vohra
Aaron S Catledge
Cheng-Chien Chen
Muhammad R Haider
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
2021
Degree Name by School
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) College of Arts and Sciences
Abstract
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are one of the leading causes of death in the United State and the number of cases is ever so increasing. The rises in the number of CVD patients are due to the increasingly hostile cardiovascular environments, indicated by poor diet, lack of exercise, socioeconomic and other stresses. The treatment often requires the replacement of blood vessels in the patients. For smaller diameter vascular grafts, the failure rate is high and the patency of these replaced grafts decreases significantly over the years. This failure is mostly due to a mismatch of the various properties between the native blood vessels and the replacement including the mechanical properties and the lack of robust regeneration of tissues in the replacement vessels. In addition to that, the treatment of peripheral arterial diseases (PAD) requires longer grafts with small diameters and they suffer from kinking and loop formation in the joints. There is a huge need for manufacturing off-the-shelf small-diameter vascular grafts to treat cardiovascular disease. The development of viable graft with patency comparable to autologous vessels is a great challenge. The grafts often fail due to the thrombogenic development after implantation in the body. There is a need for a detection method for the change in the hemodynamic activity inside the blood vessels.Therefore, in this study, we report the development and characterization of electrospun vascular graft from biodegradable as well as biostable polymer materials which are fabricated to be kink-resistant with the help of additive manufacturing technique 3D printing. We report the decrease in the kink radius of the graft from 2.30 cm to 0.45 cm and 0.57 cm respectively for polylactic acid (PLA) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) reinforced vascular graft. In this study, we also report the initial studies on a hemodynamic monitoring system that is capable of detecting the change in the applied pressure and initial studies on the system that could potentially be developed into a system that can be capable of detecting a blockage in the implanted graft.
Recommended Citation
Adhikari, Kiran Raj, "Kink-Resistant Vascular Grafts With Integrated Capacitance-Based Hemodynamic Monitoring System" (2021). All ETDs from UAB. 678.
https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection/678