Tailor-Made and Biodegradable Vascular Scaffolds - Microsurgery: Advances, Simulations, and Applications - page 263

Chapter 8
Tailor-Made and Biodegradable Vascular
Scaffolds
8.1 Background
Rapid regeneration of injured vascular wall is one of ultimate goals in
circulation medicine [1-4]. In most cases, transplant surgery of large
or medium-diameter vascular graft has been satisfactory in these
days. However, in the case of small diameter artery or veins where
the blood low speed is very low, surgeons still cannot transplant
vascular graft with certainty due to low patency rate.
Obstructions of blood vessel at the early stage are due to clot
formation, while those at the last stage are due to stenosis caused
by the thickening of lumen at inosculation part. In addition, the
mismatch of mechanical property between a host vessel and a
vascular graft also causes unordinary mechanical stimulation and
unordinary tissue growth, and thereby clot or stenosis is formed
inside the vascular graft.
When the vascular graft possesses biomimetic structure and
function that are very similar to living blood vessel and it can
maintain those structure and function, the graft is called to be
autonomous. The autonomous vascular graft can coexist with a host
living vessel. To create this autonomous graft at the early stage of
transplantation, we have to prepare a biomimetic vascular graft
in vitro and wait for its autonomous regeneration of coniguration