Review on common polymers in fabrication of artificial vessels used in vascular surgery and dialysis

Disease related to coronary artery is one of the important subgroups of cardiovascular diseases. Replacement of the blocked or narrowed arteries is an usual surgery for treatment of these diseases. Nowadays autografts are the best replacement for diseased vessels. Saphenous veins, radial arteries and internal mammary arteries are known as gold standards for transplants of damaged arteries in patients who suffer from cardiovascular diseases, but in many of them the autografts are not available because of different reasons such as age, small size, varicosities and previous removal. So due to the large number of requirements especially for small diameter vascular grafts, it is necessary to find a suitable replacements for diseased blood vessels. Nowadays tissue engineering attempts to design and fabricate artificial blood vessels which have the most accordance with native vessels. Also progresses in biomaterial and bioreactor technologies make it possible to fabricate synthetic vascular scaffolds which can optimal mimic the conditions of autografts. So in this paper we focused on common polymers in fabrication of artificial vascular scaffolds.