ANALYSES OF THE DEVICE-TISSUE INTERFACES OF PREVIOUSLY IMPLANTED STENTS WITHIN PERFUSION-FIXED HUMAN HEARTS UTIILIZING MICRO COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY

Coronary artery disease can be caused by partial or total occlusions of the coronaries, leading to cardiac ischemia. Today, the percutaneous implantation of stents is the most common treatment to open such blockages and thus restore oxygen delivery to the myocardium. Subsequent stent calcification or restenosis may hinder the effectiveness of these stents over time. The Visible Heart® Laboratories have a collection of 30 perfusion-fixed human hearts that had a total of 35 such intervention prior to organ donation. Micro computed tomography (micro CT) can be used to study the device-tissue interfaces of stents implanted up to decades prior to recovery. These procedures were scanned with approximately 40-micron resolution. Computational models were generated such that calcification and restenosis could be visualized and quantified. Within this unique data-set, there was a wide variety of stent length, location, and volume of calcification present. Although 90% of the cases had varying degree of calcification present outside the stent only 11% showed any degree of restenosis. This is a unique research opportunity to micro CT scan 35 cases of therapeutically implanted stents in perfusion-fixed specimens. Extensive visualizations and analyses can be performed on generated computational 3D models, so to provide for better understanding of the variations within the device-tissue interfaces of therapeutically implanted stents.