Class: BE210
Group: W10
Members:

Charles Dunlap
David Jordan
Michelle Kam
Pooja Sethi
Ling Zhou

Date: April 2004

Full Text

Abstract: 

Since the beginning of surgical history, sutures have been the surgeons primary means of repairing damaged tissues, cut vessels, and surgical incisions. By definition, a suture is a thread that either approximates or maintains tissues until the natural healing process has pro-vided a sufficient level of wound strength or has compressed blood vessels in order to stop bleed-ing. Since their invention, sutures have been comprised of many different materials. By the twentieth century, however, cotton and treated natural materials have come to be the most widely used materials. Sutures are probably the largest group of devices implanted in humans; their use is one of the most common practices in the medical field and thus has direct effect on a great majority of the world’s population. Taken into consideration in the manu-facturing and in the use of sutures are properties including stress-strain relationship, tensile strength, and elasticity. Properties such as force-displacement relationship and tensile strength have a direct effect on how much force at a given rate the closure will be able to withstand. Flexi-bility, or elasticity, in relationship to tensile strength is also of high priority in suture manu-facture; for example, a suture material that has a sufficient diameter and strength to hold muscle edges together might not fare well because its rigid microfilament structure might cause it to become too stiff for handling. A unique combi-nation of these mechanical properties renders one suture type better than another, and this can be dictated by the material from which the suture is made and the manner in which it is tied.