Medical devices that are inserted in blood vessels always risk eliciting thrombosis, and the surface properties of such devices are thus of major importance. The initiating step for surface-induced pathological coagulation has been associated with adsorption of fibrinogen protein on biomaterial surfaces and subsequent polymerization into an insoluble fibrin clot. This issue gives rise to an inherent challenge in biomaterial design as varied surface materials must fulfill specialized roles while also minimizing thrombotic complications from spontaneous fibrin(ogen) recruitment. We have aimed to characterize the thrombogenic properties of state-of-the-art cardiovascular biomaterials and medical devices by quantifying the relative surface-dependent adsorption and formation of fibrin followed by analysis of the resulting morphologies. We identified stainless steel and amorphous fluoropolymer as comparatively preferable biomaterials based on their low fibrin(ogen) recruitment, in comparison to other metallic and polymeric biomaterials, respectively. In addition, we observed a morphological trend that fibrin forms fiber structures on metallic surfaces and fractal branched structures on polymeric surfaces. Finally, we used vascular guidewires as clotting substrates and found that fibrin adsorption depends on parts of the guidewire that are exposed, and we correlated the morphologies on uncoated guidewires with those formed on raw stainless-steel biomaterials.
Keywords: biomaterials; fibrin; fractals; medical devices; thrombosis.