Modern Medical
Tubing for Medical Device Downgauging
Today advances in minimally
invasive techniques are extremely important to medical industry and the clinical
community. The challenge is to forge a different path for accessing anatomy that
was previously accomplished via open surgery procedures. From an end-user
perspective, minimally invasive techniques offers huge benefits in terms of
cost, procedure time, recovery, patient comfort and improved efficacy. Better
yet, the idea isn’t limited to the vascular procedures, such as stenting and
balloon angioplasty, that are most often associated with minimally invasive,
catheter-based procedures. Advances in device design that afford improved access
require delivery catheters with lower profiles, i.e. smaller outer diameters,
without sacrificing real estate inside the catheter.
This is driving the need for
advances in polymer extrusion technology and other processes and components for
minimally invasive devices. This paradigm shift in approach from open surgery to
minimally invasive access would not be possible without the co-evolution of
polymer extrusion technology.
Today, Medical tube manufacturers
offer more properties, more material options, and more precise process control
than ever before. At the same time, there’s a lot less to their products than
there used to be. Tubes have also shrunk dramatically in recent years, to the
point where a human hair is thick compared with some tube walls.
Though small, specialty tubing
can cost many times more than conventional high-volume tubes. By far, the
biggest trend in the device industry is downgauging. These diminutive tubes are
used to make catheters that can be inserted into the cardiovascular system. The
smaller the catheter, the farther it can travel in a network of arteries of
diminishing size. Supersmall catheters also cause less trauma when inserted into
the body.
Precision Extrusion makes tubing
with walls about a quarter as thick as a human hair. And some of Advanced
Polymers’ tubes have such thin walls that they can take the place of coatings.
While reducing the outside diameter (OD) of their products, tubing manufacturers
want to maintain as large an inside diameter (ID) as possible. Larger IDs give
doctors more room to insert tools or deliver drugs into the body. Multilayer
tubes are sometimes made in a series of steps. “It’s an extrusion process
combined with an assembly process. Although multilayer tubes offer valuable
combinations of properties, they’re “astronomically expensive” compared with
conventional tubes.
(Ref:
http://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com)
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