Prevention of intimal hyperplasia using short period vascular heating without surrounding tissue injury: In vitro/in vivo experiments and thermal conduction calculation

We have been proposed novel short-term (<10s) heating balloon using the combination of light-heat conversion mechanism and heated contrast medium irrigation in the balloon to improve dilatation characteristics of balloon angioplasty. Our new balloon angioplasty had suppressed intimal hyperplasia in rabbit model. We designed following experiments to understand the mechanism of suppression of intimal hyperplasia in our new thermal balloon angioplasty. We also aimed to obtain the suitable heating condition in our angioplasty to suppress intimal hyperplasia. We studied influence of the short-term heating on smooth muscle cells (SMCs) lethality in vitro. We investigated number of SMCs reduction in media in order to prevent intimal hyperplasia. We applied to our heating balloon dilatation to chronic rabbit model using normal iliac artery to study relation between heating condition and hyperplasia suppression. We estimated temperature history of the rabbit vascular wall by thermal conduction calculation. We related the estimated temperature history to the hyperplasia suppression effect in the chronic rabbit model. Finally, we obtained the relation between number of SMCs decreases and intimal hyperplasia suppression. We obtained that the short-term heating with 10s laser irradiation corresponding to estimated temperature of 50°C in the media and prevented intimal hyperplasia in the rabbit chronic model. In this case, we estimated about 30 percents of SMCs cellular lethality in media.