Biomechanical Analysis of Stent Placement in a Coronary Bifurcation Considering the Anisotropic Response of the Wall

The role of finite element simulations during the design and evaluation of medical devices is gaining importance. Such simulations provide insights into the mechanical behaviour of medical devices and help to identify the critical design parameters. One important category are vascular implants such as stents, stent grafts, aortic valve stents among others. A realistic vascular geometry and an adequate constitutive model are basic requirements in order to accurately assess the behaviour of such vascular implants during and after implantation by numerical analysis. Many recently described vascular models, for example in the field of stenting, contain rather severe simplifications both on the geometrical and the constitutive level, although the feasibility of using accurate models has been demonstrated recently by, for example, Kiousis et al. [1]. This observation may be explained by the fact that specific anisotropic material models suitable to describe the large deformations of vascular tissue are not available in standard material libraries of some of the widely used finite element solvers. For example, the ABAQUS’ material library only contains two forms of anisotropic hyperelastic materials.