Stroke is the second leading cause of death in the world. Ischemic stroke, caused by the blockage of intracranial arteries, accounts for approximately 80% of strokes. Among this proportion, acute ischemic stroke, usually caused by the sudden formation of blood clots, can cause fatal blockages in arteries. We proposed a unique blood clot retriever for the treatment of acute ischemic stroke, and conducted a series of tasks, including design, computer simulation, prototyping, and bench testing, for the proof of concept. Unlike most blood clot retrievers used today, our novel design deviates from traditional stent-like blood clot retrievers and uses large closed cells, irregular spikes, and strut protrusions to achieve maximum entanglement for better retrieval performance. Experimental results showed that the retrieval rate of our blood clot retriever was 79%, which demonstrated the feasibility of our new design concept.

Vascular stents could suffer from repetitive motions due to pulsatile blood pressure and daily activities. Stent fatigue resistance has thus become a critical issue for stent design. In this paper, an intriguing stent design concept aimed at enhancing the fatigue life was investigated. The concept was to re-distribute stresses more uniformly by tapering the stent strut width. Finite element models were developed to evaluate the mechanical integrity and fatigue safety factor of the stent under various loading conditions. Simulation results show that the fatigue safety factor of this novel stent design increased by 4 times that of a conventional stent. Conceptual stent prototypes were cut by a pulsed-fiber laser, followed by a series of expansions and heat treatments to gradually shape the stent to its target size. A rotating bending fatigue tester was built for this study and stent fatigue tests were conducted for proof of concept. Experimental results show that this stent design concept successfully enhanced the fatigue life as designed. Its fatigue cycle number jumped to 6∼7 times that of a conventional stent, which agreed well with the trend predicted by FEA simulations. The findings of this paper provide an excellent guide to greatly improve stent fatigue life.