Design and fabrication of helical capacitive stents for monitoring arterial blockages

Arterial blockages are the root cause of heart attack. These blockages cut the oxygen rich supply of the heart making a permanent damage to heart muscles. This paper presents a preliminary work for a novel helical capacitive stent model forming a telemetric material sensor. The sensor is basically a passive LC resonator tank which has a resonant frequency depending on the values of its inductance and capacitance. The capacitor layer was built over the inductor layer and both were isolated by an insulation coat between them. The theory was initially tested on substitute models preceded with the fabrication of actual stent base. This base was fabricated out of a planer sheet of 304 stainless-steel using electrical discharge machining (EDM) and was patterned to be a high inductance helical structure, upon expansion. The substitute stent models, when tested on a network analyzer, showed a resonance frequency dip at 242.65 MHz for fully coated and at 227.9 MHz for partially coated substitute stent model while measuring its S11 parameter. These readings reflect the capabilities of helical capacitive stent structures to be used as LC monitoring platforms for arterial blockages.