Artery vessel fabrication using the combined fused deposition modeling and electrospinning techniques

In this paper a new combined method of Rapid Prototyping, fused deposition modeling (FDM) and electrospinning have been proposed for the fabrication of Coronary Artery Bypass Graft. In this paper a dynamically optimum design of blood vessel graft was constructed using fused deposition modeling (FDM). Fabrication of 3D coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) model was constructed using pro-engineer based on the optimum hemodynamic analysis and was converted to an STstereolithography (STL) file format which was imported to the Magic software where it was edited to a high resolution contour. The model was then created from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) which was used as a collector for electrospinning method. For the electrospinning thermoplastic polyurethane was dissolved with hexafluoroisopropanol (HFIP). The voltage applied for electrospinning was 15 kV. The FDM model was used to collect nanofibers at fixed distance. The properties of the fabricated vessel agreed well with those of human artery. The proposed method can be effectively used for the fabrication of an optimized graft design. This proposed method has been proved as a promising fabrication processes in fabricating a specially designed graft with the correct physical and mechanical properties. The proposed method is novel and combines the advantages of both FDM and electrospinning techniques.