Despite the value of imaging techniques routinely used during stent implantation and follow-up as diagnostic tools [1], they are affected by errors and the resulting information might not be accurate enough to be employed in engineering analyses of stent deformation. In this study, we aim to evaluate the error of different clinical images and postprocessing by comparison with micro-CT (μCT) as a gold standard. Additionally, an optical image acquisition method was evaluated.
The stent analyzed in this study is a CP stent (NuMed Inc, Hopkinton, NY, USA). Using Magnetic resonance (MR) images a patient's implantation site was reconstructed (Mimics, Materialise, Leuven, Belgium) and rapid prototyped with a flexible elastomeric material (TangoPlus Full-Cure® 930 compound, Objet Ltd, Rehovot, Israel). The stent was mounted on this mould and six metallic spheres were glued to provide reference points (Fig. 1).
The imaging techniques used were: μCT (SkyScanner, NRecon, Skyscan,...
