Increasing the visibility of thin NITINOL vascular implants

Abstract

New implants for vascular therapy like flow diverters are made of tiny braided wires. The radio opacity of these wires is poor, which makes assessment of implant expansion and exact positioning difficult. Additional markers only allow the estimation of the current device position, but they also induce artefacts that impair the assessment during the intervention and in follow-up examination. A new strategy to increase implant visibility is the braiding of composite wires with a radiopaque core along the whole implant. This paper shows some useful combinations of these new wires on a phantom study with five vascular implants.

Keywords

• vascular implants
• radio opacity
• DFT
• composite wires
• visibility
• imaging