Design and finite element analysis of a novel smart clamper for aortic cross-clamping in minimally invasive surgery.

Aortic cross-clamping is a critical action during heart surgeries which may cause some injuries to the wall of the artery. These injuries may have both short-term and long-term adverse effects on the artery function. Appropriate clampers can properly occlude the artery and decrease the extent of injury. Thus, developing a model for evaluation of such clampers is inevitable. In this paper, a finite element model of the aorta is presented; then, different mechanisms of clamping are investigated. In this regard, a numerical model of aortic cross-clamping by three types of clampers has been implemented with consideration of nonlinear behavior of two-layer artery, residual stress in aorta, and calcification. These three clamper models are commercial Chitwood clamper and linear mechanism clamper with and without balloon. Using the obtained results, comparative analysis was performed between the proposed clamper design and the commercial one. Based upon the analysis, it was concluded that the designed clamper, linear mechanism clamper with balloon, helps to distribute the stress uniformly in different layers of the aorta, which results in better performance of the clamping procedure and causes less injury in the aorta, especially when there is calcification.