Numerical modeling of coronary drug eluting stents.

One of the principal therapies considered for the control of in-stent restenosis is the use of drug loaded polymer-coated stents for local delivery. We present two-dimensional and three-dimensional numerical models to study local delivery of drug eluting stents. The impact of various stent and flow parameters on the concentration distribution in the wall are investigated including the effect of the strut size, coating thickness, strut inter-distance and strut embedment in the vascular wall, blood flowing speed and the respective diffusion coefficients in the blood, wall and polymer. We also present criteria to assess the drug delivery efficiency based of the concept of the therapeutic window which aims at an spatial homogeneous concentration distribution and we introduce the variables to assess the amount of drug delivered in the wall. The results suggest that advection have a much stronger effect compared to diffusion in the blood media and that drug diffusivity in the arterial wall and in the polymer coating significantly affects the drug distribution. It is also shown that fully-embedded struts provide better spatial drug concentration uniformity after a short period of time and the half-embedded struts have a better temporal uniformity.