A COMPLIANT BIOLOGICAL VASCULAR PROSTHESIS

One requirement of the mechanical parameters for an acceptable vascula r prosthesis is compliance. The compliance of a vascular prosthesis is defined as the fractional change in luminal volume per unit change in applied pressure. A compliant prosthesis has been correlated to prost hesis patency and long-term efficacy in an animal study. However, ther e have been very few reports on how to manufacture a compliant prosthe sis. It is the objective of this study to research the processing meth ods to manufacture a reasonably compliant vascular prosthesis. A new f ixative, polyepoxy compound, was used to fix an artery. The arteries w ere fixed under different degrees of longitudinal retraction. By locki ng in the collagen micro-structure at an overly relaxed state and then crosslinking said collagen, the resulting biological prosthesis exhib ited extreme compliance and pliability. A prosthesis matching its arte rial origin in tensile modulus was achieved by crosslinking an artery at its 45% retraction longitudinally. This flexible prosthesis showed a volumetric compliance index of 18.4 +/- 0.9 %DELTA/100 mmHg and a lo ngitudinal tensile modulus of 942 grams/cm2. Our current study indicat ed that a prosthesis fixed with polyepoxy compounds has shown more pli ability than that with glutaraldehyde. Further animal study to correla te prostheses patency to different degrees of compliance is needed to confirm this proposed manufacturing approach.