Future Steps

The pre-clinical flow model that we have developed will primarily be used at the Guidant In Vito Preclinical Research and Development center in Santa Clara, CA. They also intend to fabricate more copies of our flow model and send it to the Guidant Training Centers in Belgium and Japan. They plan to use the model during the early phases of device design to test cardiovascular products under realistic operating conditions.  Once a design is fully developed, the model is used again as a marketing tool for physician training.

Recomendations

For the purposes of this project, the motion produced by the heart model adds adequate coronary displacement.  However, the displacement values are not completely accurate according to the data taken for the coronary CAD model.  It is our recommendation that the team at Guidant create a secondary prototype which incorporates the variable wall thickness calculated in the FEA analysis described above.  See Figure 59 for the suggested wall thickness values and locations.