Viscoelastic evaluation of fetal umbilical vein for reconstruction of middle cerebral artery

The transplantation of artificial blood vessels with < 6 mm inner diameter as substitutes for human arterioles or veins has not achieved satisfactory results. Umbilical vein has been substituted for ar-tery in vascular transplantation, but it remains unclear whether the stress relaxation and creep tween these vessels are consistent. In this study, we used the fetal umbilical vein and middle cere-bral artery from adult male cadavers to make specimens 15 mm in length, 0.196–0.268 mm in nica media thickness, and 2.82–2.96 mm in outer diameter. The results demonstrated that the stress decrease at 7 200 seconds was similar between the middle cerebral artery and fetal umbilical vein specimens, regardless of initial stress of 18.7 kPa or 22.5 kPa. However, the strain increase at 7 200 seconds of fetal umbilical veins was larger than that of middle cerebral arteries. Moreover, the stress relaxation experiment showed that the stress decrease at 7 200 seconds of the fetal umbilical vein and middle cerebral artery specimens under 22.5 kPa initial stress was less than the decrease in these specimens under 18.7 kPa initial stress. These results indicate that the fetal umbilical vein has appropriate stress relaxation and creep properties for transplantation. These properties are advantageous for vascular reconstruction, indicating that the fetal umbilical vein can be transplanted to repair middle cerebral artery injury.