Personalised External Aortic Root Support: an engineering perspective

Personalised External Aortic Root Support (PEARS) surgery is now an established surgical approach in the management of aortic dilation in patients with Marfan Syndrome and related congenital conditions in which there is asymptomatic dilation of the aortic root/ascending aorta [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. In establishing this new surgical approach, a number of engineering issues were successfully addressed by a multi disciplinary team combining surgeons, radiologists and engineers. This paper discusses some of the principal engineering challenges facing the team at the feasibility stage of the project.