RESEARCH ARTICLE


Shape Memory Polymer Foams for Biomedical Devices



Witold Sokolowski*
Corresponding author: Witold Sokolowski, Sokolowski Consulting Services, Arcadia, CA 91006, USA.


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© 2010 Sokolowski 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.

Correspondence: * Address correspondence to this author at the Corresponding author: Witold Sokolowski, Sokolowski Consulting Services, Arcadia, CA 91006, USA. Phone: 626-574-7027, Fax: 626-446-1335, E-mail: wsokolowski@earthlink.net


Abstract

Developed in last decade, the shape memory polymers (SMP) have been gaining widespread attention for new product innovation. They are lightweight, have a high strain/shape recovery ability, are easy to process, and required properties can be tailored for a variety of applications. Recently a number of medical applications have been considered and investigated for polyurethane-based SMP materials. Newly developed SMP foams, together with cold hibernated elastic memory (CHEM) processing, further broaden their potential biomedical applications. Polyurethane-based CHEM foams are described here and major advantages are identified over other medical materials. Recently, several important applications are being considered for CHEM foams as self-deployable vascular and coronary devices. One of these potential applications, the endovascular treatment of aneurysms, was experimentally investigated with encouraging results and is described in this paper as well.

Keywords: Shape memory polymers, cold hibernated elastic memory, polyurethane, aneurysm..