• Currently, stent therapy constitutes to over 95% of all endovascular interventions

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• The biological and clinical complications of stent therapy can now be well controlled

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• Mechanical failure remains an important clinical problem

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• The failure usually proceeds through mechanical fracture activation due to fatigue

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• The virtual analysis of fracture is typically conducted using the Finite Element Method (FEM)

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• Sunergolab Inc. pursue an alternative approach, called Peridynamics

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• Peridynamic damage model does not require special criteria to guide damage growth and naturally accounts for surface roughness that can highly influence the fatigue life of stent 

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• Sunergolab's peridynamic solver exploited in this study explicitly resolved stent fracture initiation and the underlying mechanical force resulting from clinically observed stent deformation ​

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• Initial  CAD geometry of the patient-specific stent is a courtesy of Prof. Bressloff

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• This CAD geometry accounts for a stent deformation  due to interactions with the walls of  coronary artery

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• Time harmonic displacement (Dirichlet) boundary conditions were applied to the edges of the stent to induce fatigue damage

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• An accumulated longitudinal  tension was found

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• The stent geometry preserved main shape features during the stimulated tension

• Fatigue damage due to accumulated longitudinal tension in the patient-specific stent does not propagate far from the deformed edges

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• The fatigue damage peaks at the connecting struts of the patient-specific stent

• Credit/acknowledgement: The turbine blades geometry is the courtesy of Prof. Bressloff (Ragkousis et al.,  2014, “Simulation of longitudinal stent deformation in a patient-specific coronary artery”,  Medical Engineering & Physics, 36(4), pp. 467-476)