The prevalence of cardiovascular disease in our country is increasing, and it has been a big problem affecting the social and economic development. It has been demonstrated that early intervention of cardiovascular risk factors can effectively reduce cardiovascular disease-caused mortality. Therefore, extensive implementation of cardiovascular testing and risk factor screening in the general population is the key to the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease. However, the categories of devices available for quick cardiovascular testing are limited, and in particular, many existing devices suffer from various technical problems, such as complex operation, unclear working principle, or large inter-individual variability in measurement accuracy, which lead to an overall low popularity and reliability of cardiovascular testing. In this study, we introduce the non-invasive measurement mechanisms and relevant technical progresses for several typical cardiovascular indices (e.g., peripheral/central arterial blood pressure, and arterial stiffness), with emphasis on describing the applications of biomechanical modeling and simulation in mechanism verification, analysis of influential factors, and technical improvement/innovation.
Lower extremity movement is a complex and large range of limb movement. Arterial stents implanted in lower extremity are prone to complex mechanical deformation, so the stent is required to have high comprehensive mechanical properties. In order to evaluate the mechanical property of different stents, in this paper, finite element method was used to simulate and compare the mechanical properties of six nitinol stents (Absolute Pro, Complete SE, Lifestent, Protégé EverFlex, Pulsar-35 and New) under different deformation modes, such as radial compression, axial compression/tension, bending and torsion, and the radial support performance of the stents was verified by experiments. The results showed that the comprehensive performance of New stent was better than other stents. Among which the radial support performance was higher than Absolute Pro and Pulsar-35 stent, the axial support performance was better than Complete SE, Lifestent and Protégé EverFlex stent, the flexibility was superior to Protégé Everflex stent, and the torsion performance was better than Complete SE, Lifestent and Protégé Everflex stent. The TTR2 type radial support force tester was used to test the radial support performance of 6 types, and the finite element analysis results were verified. The mechanical properties of the stent are closely related to the structural size. The result provides a reference for choosing a suitable stent according to the needs of the diseased location in clinical applications.