Choosing Wisely: Optimizing Medical Textiles To Enhance Cardiovascular Devices

By Andrew Metzger, Amy Zakrzewski, and Dan Treusch, Secant Group

The medical device industry has demanded thinner textile materials to ensure that implantable devices can better accommodate minimally invasive heart procedures. As such, raw materials have become more versatile to include smaller, finer denier yarns and new, texturized materials. This flexibility enables fabrics to be modified in countless ways to enhance the functionality of cardiovascular devices.

To ensure a cardiovascular medical device includes the right materials, device designers can work with an expert textile partner to understand how different fabrics work, including the functional differences between braided, knit, and woven textiles. An expert partner who is solely dedicated to designing and manufacturing textiles — and who understands the applications of those devices — can help organizations leverage the benefits of each textile-forming technology, whether applied to a novel device or modifying or improving a predicate device.

While the base technology for creating braided, knit, or woven textiles hasn’t changed much over the years, the implantable medical device industry constantly pushes textile technology to be more efficient, automated, and precise to better serve next-generation needs. Consider that, moving forward, composite or surface-modified structures could potentially address biological issues in the cardiovascular space such as thrombosis and durability.
With an expert by their side from sketch to scale, device manufacturers can move quickly by using optimized raw materials that are chosen early in the design process, leveraging readily available fabric samples, and working closely with a team of textile engineers to guide the design and manufacture of custom fabrics for their next cardiovascular device innovation.