RESEARCH ARTICLE
Thermo-Moisture Responsive Polyurethane Shape Memory Polymer for Biomedical Devices
WM Huang*
School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798, Singapore.
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2010Volume: 2
First Page: 11
Last Page: 19
Publisher Id: TOMDJ-2-11
DOI: 10.2174/18751814010020200011
Article History:
Received Date: 20/4/2009Revision Received Date: 25/4/2009
Acceptance Date: 25/4/2009
Electronic publication date: 19/1/2010
Collection year: 2010
© 2010 Huang et al.;
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Shape memory polymers (SMPs) have a number of advantages as compared with their metal counterpart, i.e., shape memory alloys, in particular for biomedical applications. The recent finding of the influence of moisture on the glass transition temperature of a polyurethane SMP, which is traditionally well-known for its thermo-responsive feature, enables us to achieve not only the so called moisture-driven for shape recovery, but also the recovery following a predetermined sequence, i.e., programmed recovery. Utilizing these new features, we demonstrate a few novel applications of this SMP for biomedical devices, in particular, for minimally invasive surgery and cell surgery in future.
Keywords: Shape memory polymer, medical device, programmable, polyurethane, moisture responsive..
