How does a stent work? (Model Demonstration)

Aortic dissection could be treated with a stent, especially in the presence of complications. So patients who have a rupture or inadequate blood flow to their blood vessels in the gut or the kidneys or the legs should get a stent to treat the immediate lack of blood flow. The stent would look like this. This is a piece of special metal lined up with fabric made of either polyester or plastic that gets delivered from the groin under camera vision and go up to the location that we want. Here you can see, this is the aorta, this is the heart, and in between the portion of the aorta that is going in the chest and the heart, there are what we call the candy cane thing looks like, what looks like a candy cane is what we call the aortic arch. This arch is very important to understand that the blood vessels that supply the brain and the arms come from the top of this arch. So whenever we want to fix or we want to treat a pathology like aortic dissection or an aortic mechanism that involves the top of the aorta, we need to have a graft that is accommodating for these blood vessels. We cannot just put a graft across these blood vessels because this fabric, as I said, will cover these branches, these critical branches. So this is the aortic arch that we need to accommodate with a special made devices that has holes or branches in them, like fenestrations or branches, to accommodate the arch vessels.