Modeling Drug Eluting Stents for Coronary Artery Bifurcation Considering Non-Newtonian Effects

Drug Eluting Stents (DES) are commonly used for the treatment of stenotic arteries. Restenosis can be treated by delivering anti-thrombotic and anti-proliferative drugs to the arterial wall. The main mechanism of the drug eluting stent is to allow diffusion of the drug from the coating on the stent, into the arterial wall over a prolonged period of time. Investigation of blood flow hemodynamics and shear stress are of great importance in understanding the transport of drugs through the circulatory systems and predicting the performance of drug eluting stents. While drug eluting stent effectively reduces restenosis rate, the conventional drug eluting stent should be optimized to be used in the bifurcation stenting. Various flow patterns due to specific designs of drug eluting stent influence drug delivery. Numerical simulation techniques are appropriate approaches to study such phenomena which can be used to optimize the design of drug eluting stents for bifurcations. In this paper, the complexity of drug eluting stent function in the bifurcation is presented by employing computational fluid dynamics analysis for various stent strut designs. Drug transportation through the lumen and determination of local drug concentrations in arterial wall is carried out for both Newtonian and non-Newtonian flow conditions. It is, to the author’s best knowledge, the first investigation of drug dispersion in arterial bifurcation considering the effects of both the blood rheological properties and stent strut design.