Modeling techniques suggest that polymer-based trileaflet mechanical heart valves mimicking natural geometry and biomaterial properties may offer improvements over traditional bileaflet designs.
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Proposed polymer trileaflet valves require preclinical validation before any practice consideration; leaves open superiority to bileaflet designs.
Although heart valve replacement is among the most common cardiovascular surgical procedures, their outcome is often difficult to predict. One of the reasons is the design and choice of the materials used for the fabrication of the prostheses. This review paper describes the use of modeling techniques in prosthetic heart valve (HV) design and aims at the justification and development of a polymer based trileaflet mechanical heart valve (MHV). The closing/opening phase behavior of the bileaflet MHV was investigated. The potential problem of valve failure due to crack propagation in the brittle pyrolytic carbon leaflet was also discussed. These studies suggest that although bileaflet MHV performs satisfactorily, there are justifications for improvement. Since the native aortic HV is trileaflet and made of anisotropic and hyperelastic tissue, one possible approach to a better MHV design is based on our ability to closely mimic the natural geometry and biomaterial properties.
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Mohammadi et al. (2010) studied this question.
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