EXPAND - Enabling growth-adaptive eXpansion of vascular grafts with PAtieNt-specific auxetic material Design
Pediatric implants are burdened with the challenge that patients typically have years of somatic growth ahead of them at the time of the treatment. This project proposes to develop the methodology for designing patient-specific auxetic vascular grafts that have the capacity to adapt to patient-specific somatic growth from childhood to adulthood.
Auxetics are a class of smart materials that exhibits an exceptional mechanical behavior: when stretched, they expand in both the stretched direction and perpendicular to it, perfectly matching the requirements of growth-adaptive vascular grafts.
The growth-adaptive capabilities rely on the specific form of this auxetic scaffold, that will be designed to match the anatomical dimensions (length and diameter) of the patient at the time of insertion and allow for predefined expansion (via balloon angioplasty) in multiple stages following the projected growth.
The relevant medical data of 60 patients is collected from ‘Hartekind’ and Dutch Heart foundation studies running from 2018, with support from an expert medical team from LUMC.
