Bioengineered in vitro Vascular Models for Applications in Interventional Radiology.

The role of endovascular interventions has progressed rapidly over the past several decades. While animal models have long served as the mainstay for the advancement of this field, the use of in vitro models has become increasingly widely adopted with recent advances in engineering technologies. Here we review the strategies, mainly including bioprinting and microfabrication, that allow for fabrication of biomimetic vascular models that will potentially serve to supplement the conventional animal models for convenient investigations of endovascular interventions. Besides normal blood vessels, those in diseased states, such as thrombosis, may also be modeled by integrating cues that simulate the microenvironment of vascular disorders. These novel engineering strategies for development of biomimetic in vitro vascular structures will possibly enable unconventional means of studying complex endovascular intervention problems that are otherwise hard to address using existing models.