Introduction Cardiovascular diseases are presently the leading cause of death in humans (Murray and Lopez 1997). From clinical practice, it is known that specific sites in the human circulatory system are particularly sensitive to the development of cardiovascular diseases. Fluid dynamics studies have been used to improve the knowledge of cardiovascular diseases. Experimental in vitro flow studies require the construction of a model of the blood vessel under study. To measure the flow through optical techniques, the model must be transparent in the wavelength of the light used and its half thickness must be smaller than the focal distance of the objective. In this work, a multi stage approach was developed to create 3D artery models from real CT scans in the millimetre-scale range, with or without stenosis, using melted sucrose as casting material. This method allows us to produce transparent non-contaminated PDMS channels suitable for flow visualizations and optical flow measurements. In parallel, the CT scans are processed to generate a computational mesh for hemodynamic simulations.