A Virtual Product Development Strategy for Minimally Invasive Medical Devices

Virtual design tools are gaining more and more importance in the production process of medical devices. Biomedical devices and their surrounding boundary conditions are usually characterized by complex geometrical shapes, materials and interactions, and current Abaqus capabilities in dealing with highly non-linear problems are highly needed to realistically capture these complexities. As an example, stents can be laser-cut or braided, driven by folded balloons to expand or be self-expanding and they interact with stenosed, tortuous, highly non-linear and anisotropic blood vessels. In order to investigate in detail some of the above mentioned aspects of stenting we have developed a dedicated preand postprocessing tool based on the open-source design software pyFormex. The enormous potential of combining this design environment with Abaqus is illustrated in this paper, focusing on balloonand self-expanding stents, embolic protection filters and patient specific modeling. This paper aims at providing a survey of the latest developments carried out in our research unit in this area and detailed information with respect to the simulations can be found in the cited works.