Microscopic Surface Geometries and Blood Clotting: A Computational Analysis

Biofouling and thrombogenesis present a challenge tobiomedical products that contact blood plasma. These devices include heartvalves and artificial blood vessels. Excessive blood‐borne protein depositionon device surfaces likely lead to clot formation and eventual device failure. Toprevent clot formations, an effective anti‐thrombotic surface is needed toallow for more viable regenerative medical devices and procedures. Previousresearch suggests superhydrophobic surfaces serve as one method to reduceprotein deposition and clot formation. The hierarchical surface features of superhydrophobicsurfaces allow fluids to rest in the fakir state which produces substantiallyreduced fluid‐to‐surface contact area and increased droplet mobility. Simple engineering techniques have successfully demonstrate that superhydrophobicsurfaces reduce clot formation compared to control surfaces. This study uses a predictive computational program to model blood droplet behavior on microscopic surface features. The computational software uses the gradient descent method to predict equilibrium droplet positions and geometries based on the surface energies of the fluid and surface features. The software predicts and visualizes the impact various surface feature dimensions have on the ability of human blood to maintain the fakir state. The new optimization builds off of prior work from previous literature by considering the non‐homogenous nature of whole human blood and the varying surface energies of coagulation cascade proteins. The optimized surface feature geometries potentially provides a more efficient anti‐clotting surface for biomedical devices. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .