Modeling and Design of Coated Stents to Optimize the Effect of the Dose

Stents are used in interventional cardiology to keep a diseased vessel open. New stents are coated with a medicinal agent to prevent early reclosure due to the proliferation of smooth muscle cells. It is recognized that it is the dose of the agent that effectively controls the cells in the wall of the vessel. This paper focuses on the effect of the number of struts and the ratio between the coated area of the struts and the targeted area of the vessel on the design problem under set therapeutic bounds on the dose. It introduces mathematical models of the dose for a zero-thickness periodic stent and an asymptotic stent that will playa central role in our analysis. Theoretical and numerical results are presented along with their impact on the design process.