Application of µCT for the Determination of Total Surface Area of Stents

Coronary stents are mesh like structures having complex geometrical shapes. Their complex geometry makes it difficult to estimate their surface area exactly which is necessary in different experiments to study the degradation behavior. There are methods available to calculate or estimate the stent outer surface area which is also called Metallic Surface Area (MSA). In this vicinity, no method available in the literature to determine the total surface area of stent with all exposed sides. In this work, a non-destructive method is presented to calculate total surface area of stents by using micro computed tomography (µCT) measurements. Since the corrosion rate calculations need exposed surface area of samples. Therefore, with the help of this method, stents can be used as a test samples instead of regular geometrical shaped samples for corrosion tests.