Circulation Type Blood Vessel Simulator Made by Microfabrication

Recently, Japanese have causes of the death. Figure 1.1 was reported by Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2008 in Japan and which shows the cause of the death. As you can see, the causes of death are cancer, cardiac disease, cerebrovascular disease and etc.. We can categorize cardiac disease and cerebrovascular disease as blood vessel disease. Blood vessel disease is the second highest cause of the death. To treat the cancer and blood vessel disease, many engineering approaches have been studied about tissue engineering, medical treatment tools, rehearsal systems and synthetic vascular prostheses. For treatment of cancer, there are researches of endoscope and abdominoscope for less-invasive surgical operation. For treatment of blood vessel disease, there are researches of endoscope which can use in blood vessels and synthetic vascular prostheses for replacement operation. These researches have the common identity that is improvement of quality of life (QOL). But, these lessinvasive operations are poor in extracting the organ size and controlling the posture of medical tools. To solve these problems, many researches from the other approaches are proposed. One of them is research about surgical simulators for rehearsal, practice and evaluation of real surgical operation. Generally, VR simulator and CFD analysis are famous as computer surgical simulator (Fig.1.2 (a) and (b)). These simulators enable to simulate surgical operation easily, and analyze fluid condition easily, however, these are poor in simulating pulsative system and not suitable to evaluate new treatment method using narrow vessels. Our surgical simulator (Endo Vascular Evaluator: EVE) has threedimensional (3D) blood vessel models fabricated in tailor-made (Fig.1.2 (c)) (Ikeda et al., 2005). And, EVE enables to simulate pulsative system and catheter operation easily, but, not suitable to evaluate new treatment method using narrow vessels. There are two famous methods using narrow vessels. One is a method of necrotizing cancer cells in the part of liver as shown in Fig.1.3 (a) (trancecatheter arterial chemoembolization: TACE, TAE). The other is a method of administering medicine as shown in Fig.1.3 (b) (drug delivery systems:DDS). TAE method protocol is to release anticancer drug and gelatin sponge in blood vessels for stack, then stop the blood flow and the supply nourishment. Stacking gelatin sponge has a possibility of effect to normal cells. Thus, gelatin sponge are needed to release from catheter, and it is very difficult to selectivity stack the only arteriole and capillary vessels which rink to cancer cells. However, blood fluidic condition is very complicated, and catheter’s position, amount of anticancer drug and gelatin sponge, fluidic and pressure condition, environmental condition changed by catheter and effects to other