Projects / Programmes
Intelligent fibers for medical applications.
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 2.05.00 |
Engineering sciences and technologies |
Mechanics |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| T390 |
Technological sciences |
Polymer technology, biopolymers |
Intelligent materials, polyamide, nylon, shrinkage, shrinkage force, impulse laser, surgery, suture.
Researchers (10)
Organisations (2)
Abstract
Polyamide fibers are commonly used in the field of surgery. The most frequent problem in surgery is to enable the cohesion between two tissues when applying a suture. This cohesion depends on the contact force introduced by the suture. If the contact force is too big the tissue may die away, abnormally heal up, or it may result in changes of the tissue surface. On the other hand, if the suture is not tight enough, or when the yielding of the tissue occurs, undesirable consequences might happen, such as erroneous deformation of the eye cornea, tissue bleeding, an enlarged scar, etc.
The use of intelligent fibers, where their shrinkage is afterwards triggered with a cycling laser, would enable the tightening of the suture, and thus diminish the problems mentioned above. The current technique for tightening the suture is performed by hand. This doesn't allow a precise control of the tightening force that would assure optimal healing of the wound. In the eye surgery, the tightening force is extremely important, since it directly influences the optical properties of the cornea and thus the eyesight. The most common complication in cornea transplantations (yearly there are 40 000 such transplantations worldwide) is post-operation astigmatism. This astigmatism is very hard to fix with eyeglasses. In some cases the correction is possible using contact lenses after the suture is removed. The proposed novel suture technique, which would utilize intelligent fibers, would enable a controlled correction of astigmatism, which up until now was not possible. Using intelligent fibers to make sutures would allow the doctor to correct astigmatism already in the early post-operative period, which would improve the eyesight sharpness, and consequently lead to better quality of life after cornea transplantation.
The new generation of multimodal polyamide materials, which resulted from the longstanding collaboration between the international corporation BASF and the Center for Experimental Mechanics, enables the production of intelligent fibers, of which shrinkage dynamics can be controlled. It is possible to manufacture geometrically stabile fibers that would undergo shrinkage only when exposed above a well-defined temperature level. Such fibers open a wide variety of applications in technical and medical filed. The prime goal of the proposed project is to promote the use of intelligent fibers in medical applications.
The ability to locally control the tightening of an interrupted and/or continuous suture represents a break through in this field.
