Development of novel short-term heating angioplasty: Diameter and elasticity change of vascular wall ex vivo

In order to investigate the optimum operation parameters on novel short-term heating (<15s, approx. 70°C) balloon, named Photo-thermo dynamic balloon (PTDB), we studied diameter and elasticity change of vascular wall after dilatation ex vivo. We have been studying to develop the PTDB angioplasty in which we demonstrated sufficient vascular dilatation with lower pressure by heat- induced denaturation of arterial collagen. And we have also demonstrated the suppression of intimai hyperplasia in animal experiments. We need to understand the PTDB dilatation mechanism to determine the optimum operation parameters. The prototype PTDB with diameter of 3mm was used in our experiments. The internal diameters of extracted fresh porcine carotid arteries at pre- and post- PTDB dilatation were measured. Balloon parameters were follows; pressure P=2atm, peak temperature in balloon T=60-80°C, and heating duration t=4-30s. Morphological change in the media of dilated artery with PTDB were microscopically examined with Weigert staining. Elastic properties were carried out by stress-strain measurements with calculation of young's modulus. We found that PTDB dilatation provided the effect to prevent elastic recoil. We explained that the reason of this effect might be arrangement of micro- structure in the media, i.e., heat-denatured collagen fibers sustained the elastic recoil due to rubbery elastin fibers. The arterial elasticity was not significant different after PTDB dilatation. It was suggested that there could be no compliance mismatch after PTDB dilatation in physiological range. We found that a part of PTDB dilatation mechanism, in which the vascular wall structure played an important role. The optimum operation parameters for PTDB might be determined in consideration of collagen denaturation progress and arterial composition.