Study of parameters for evaluating the pushability of interventional devices using box-shaped blood vessel biomodels made of PVA-H or silicone.

In this paper, we investigated several parameters with effect on the compressive force to assess the mechanical properties of interventional device. We find several parameters are highly influential and others are not. In our evaluation system, we prepared a box-shaped PVA-H and silicone with realistic geometry and carried out the measurement and evaluation of the pushability by using load cell machine. The parameters of velocity, position of device in the system do not affect the compressive force, whereas the length of catheter from the tip to fixed point is one of the most influential parameters for the force. Several behaviors such as passing through the curve or slip and stop can be observed and defined using this system. The balance of the bending force and the pushing force may make the tip with behavior of slip and stop or passing thorough the curve. The investigation of the evaluation system confirmed that high reproducibility with short error bar is indicated. The observation with movie record is also an advantage of our system because the high transparency of materials with silicone and PVA-H can check the inside of artery.