Prosthesis interposition revascularization in microvascular neurosurgery. Animal experience

Extracranial-intracranial cerebral revascularization is a bypass procedure requiring the availability of a suitable extracranial donor artery as the superficial temporal artery or occipital artery. When the scalp arteries are unavailable or a high bypass flow is needed immediately after bypass operation, venous and arterial interposed grafts are used, However, autogenous vessels offer several surgical problems and surgical results are extremely unsatisfactory. Synthetic prostheses, if proved satisfactory, would possess many advantages. The procedure would be simpler with adequate supply in variety of size of synthetic grafts and requiring not to dissect out peripheral venous or arterial vessels. At the present time the problems of a vascular prosthesis with 3 mm or less in internal diameter are the patency, the thickness and the compliance of wall. We studied a new small caliber vascular prosthesis molded with "biolized" polymeric material. Synthetic grafts were interposed between the aorta and the iliac artery in rabbits.