An Expandable Prosthetic Valve for Pulmonary Position

Project Description:
Pulmonary valve stenosis (PS) generally refers to the stenosis of a pulmonary valve or the combination of a pulmonary valve and the right ventricular outflow tract, and it may exist and isolated or may also be one of the lesions of other complex congenital heart diseases (such as Tetralogy of Fallot). The current surgical correction for young patients with PS either leave a significant pulmonary regurgitation, or not accommodating patient growth.

Medical Implant Testing Lab (MITL) has developed an expandable pulmonary valve mainly for surgical implant during repair of PS. The expandability allows balloon expansion after initial surgery so no further open heart, cardio-pulmonary bypass procedure may be needed as the patient grows. The design would reduce the high risk and high invasiveness of redo surgery. The valve design has been verified with successful animal study, the expandable stent/valve design is to be developed and verified.

The goal of this project is to design pulmonary stent/valve to allow highest possible expandability, ideally expandable from 12mm to 22mm in diameter. Specifically, the project entails creating an expandable stent design utilizing finite element analysis (FEA) software for multiple design iterations, a prototype of the expandable design, validation testing for expandability using balloon expansion, valve design using the validated stent, and ex-vivo testing of the valve design for functionality and expandability.

Project Mentor:
Industry Sponsored Mentor: Shouyan Lee, PhD, Founder of Medical Implant Testing Lab, slee@angelheartintl.org
Physician Mentor: Ilhab Alomari, MD, Department of Cardiology, UCI, ialomari@uci.edu

Other Resources:
Note: students will need to sign an IP agreement to work on this project.

Team Members: 

Brandon Paul, Brian Paul, David Leonel Perez, Andon Nikolay Spassov, Aaron Christopher Widjaja