MEAM Master’s Thesis Defense: “Preliminary Design of an Origami-Inspired Pulmonary Artery Band”

Every year, infants are born with life-threatening congenital heart defects that need to be corrected with reconstructive heart surgery. In cases where blood flow through the main pulmonary artery is excessive, patients typically undergo palliative treatments such as pulmonary artery banding, which aims to reduce this blood flow to a more manageable level. While traditional pulmonary artery banding has improved the survivability of infants with this affliction, it often requires more than two open heart surgeries to be successful due to patient growth, loosening of the band, and other complications. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel, multistable pulmonary artery band inspired by origami. In addition to being cost effective and simple to deploy, this novel pulmonary artery band can be configured for magnetic control to reach its multiple stable states, potentially eliminating the need for more than two open heart surgeries for pulmonary artery banding treatment. This work details the preliminary design process of this pulmonary artery band. We begin by examining the properties of its origami fold pattern and how the device is fabricated. Next, we mechanically characterize the fold pattern and use these measurements to inform the design of magnetic infrastructure to enable magnetic untethered control. We then cover the design of a mock circulation loop developed for simulating blood flow in a patient’s body. Finally, we assess the pulmonary artery band’s ability to constrict flow through simulated in-vivo testing with the mock circulation loop. Through this testing, we were able to demonstrate proof of concept of the proposed device functioning as a pulmonary artery band.