Although stents have great success of treating cardiovascular disease, it actually undermined by the in-stent restenosis and their long-term fatigue failure. The geometry of stent affects its service performance and ultimately affects its fatigue life. Besides, improper length of balloon leads to transient mechanical injury to the vessel wall and in-stent restenosis. Conventional optimization method of stent and its dilatation balloon by comparing several designs and choosing the best one as the optimal design cannot find the global optimal design in the design space. In this study, an adaptive optimization method based on Kriging surrogate model was proposed to optimize the structure of stent and the length of stent dilatation balloon so as to prolong stent service life and improve the performance of stent. A finite element simulation based optimization method combing with Kriging surrogate model is proposed to optimize geometries of stent and length of stent dilatation balloon step by step. Kriging surrogate model coupled with design of experiment method is employed to construct the approximate functional relationship between optimization objectives and design variables. Modified rectangular grid is used to select initial training samples in the design space. Expected improvement function is used to balance the local and global searches to find the global optimal result. Finite element method is adopted to simulate the free expansion of balloon-expandable stent and the expansion of stent in stenotic artery. The well-known Goodman diagram was used for the fatigue life prediction of stent, while dogboning effect was used for stent expansion performance measurement. As the real design cases, diamond-shaped stent and sv-shaped stent were studied to demonstrate how the proposed method can be harnessed to design and refine stent fatigue life and expansion performance computationally. The fatigue life and expansion performance of both the diamond-shaped stent and sv-shaped stent are designed and refined, respectively. (a) diamond-shaped stent: The shortest distance from the data points to the failure line in the Goodman diagram was increased by 22.39%, which indicated a safer service performance of the optimal stent. The dogboning effect was almost completely eliminated, which implies more uniform expansion of stent along its length. Simultaneously, radial elastic recoil (RR) at the proximal and distal ends was reduced by 40.98 and 35% respectively and foreshortening (FS) was also decreased by 1.75%. (b) sv-shaped stent: The shortest distance from the data point to the failure line in the Goodman diagram was increased by 15.91%. The dogboning effect was also completely eliminated, RR at the proximal and distal ends was reduced by 82.70 and 97.13%, respectively, and the FS was decreased by 16.81%. Numerical results showed that the fatigue life of both stents was refined and the comprehensive expansion performance of them was improved. This article presents an adaptive optimization method based on the Kriging surrogate model to optimize the structure of stents and the length of their dilatation balloon to prolong stents fatigue life and decreases the dogboning effect of stents during expansion process. Numerical results show that the adaptive optimization method based on Kriging surrogate model can effectively optimize the design of stents and the dilatation balloon. Further investigations containing more design goals and more effective multidisciplinary design optimization method are warranted.

Biodegradable stents made of poly-l-lactic acid (PLLA) have a promising prospect thanks to high biocompatibility and a favorable biodegradation period. However, due to the low stiffness of PLLA, polymeric stents have a lower radial stiffness and larger foreshortening. Furthermore, a stent is a tiny meshed tube, hence, it is difficult to make a polymeric stent. In the present study, a finite element analysis-based optimization method combined with Kriging surrogate modeling is firstly proposed to optimize the stent structure and stent microinjection molding process, so as to improve the stent mechanical properties and microinjection molding quality, respectively. The Kriging surrogate models are constructed to formulate the approximate mathematical relationships between the design variables and design objectives. Expected improvement is employed to balance local and global search to find the global optimal design. As an example, the polymeric ART18Z stent was investigated. The mechanical properties of stent expansion in a stenotic artery and the molding quality were improved after optimization. Numerical results demonstrate the proposed optimization method can be used for the computationally measurable optimality of stent structure design and stent microinjection molding process.

In stent design optimization, the functional relationship between design parameters and design goals is nonlinear, complex, and implicit and the multi-objective design of stents involves a number of potentially conflicting performance criteria. Therefore it is hard and time-consuming to find the optimal design of stent either by experiment or clinic test. Fortunately, computational methods have been developed to the point whereby optimization and simulation tools can be used to systematically design devices in a realistic time-scale. The aim of the present study is to propose an adaptive optimization method of stent design to improve its expansion performance. Multi-objective optimization method based on Kriging surrogate model was proposed to decrease the dogboning effect and the radial elastic recoil of stents to improve stent expansion properties and thus reduce the risk of vascular in-stent restenosis injury. Integrating design of experiment methods and Kriging surrogate model were employed to construct the relationship between measures of stent dilation performance and geometric design parameters. Expected improvement, an infilling sampling criterion, was employed to balance local and global search with the aim of finding the global optimal design. A typical diamond-shaped coronary stent-balloon system was taken as an example to test the effectiveness of the optimization method. Finite element method was used to analyze the stent expansion of each design. 27 iterations were needed to obtain the optimal solution. The absolute values of the dogboning ratio at 32 and 42 ms were reduced by 94.21 and 89.43%, respectively. The dogboning effect was almost eliminated after optimization. The average of elastic recoil was reduced by 15.17%. This article presents FEM based multi-objective optimization method combining with the Kriging surrogate model to decrease both the dogboning effect and radial elastic recoil of stents. The numerical results prove that the proposed optimization method effectively decreased both the dogboning effect and radial elastic recoil of stent. Further investigations containing more design goals and more effective multidisciplinary design optimization method are warranted.

Plastic injection molding technology is one of the important technologies for the manufacturing industry. In this paper, a numerical dynamic injection molding technology (DIMT) is presented, which is based on the finite element (FE) method. This numerical simulation method introduces a vibrational force into the conventional injection molding technology (CIMT). Some meaningful work has been executed for investigating the mechanical evolution behavior of DIMT. As the basis for illustrating the mechanism in warpage optimization results, dynamic parameter analysis on the rule of pressure response is performed in detail. In the warpage optimization work, three kinds of structure with different molding materials are selected as the comparison. The final warpage of each product is efficiently minimized by using a Gaussian process-based sequential optimization method. From the further discussions, the features of DIMT in improving the molding quality are revealed, indicating that it may not be appropriate for geometrically large structures. This study has significant meaning for the actual injection molding industry.