Plenary Session III Sunday, April 2nd, 2006, 9:00 am

One of the most daunting design tasks that man has confronted has been (and still remains) the replacement of diseased, deteriorated, or damaged body parts. This is particularly true of the development of cardiovascular devices, in which intuition, trial and error, and chance still play a prominent role. Unlike other engineering disciplines in which the practice of design is founded on proven principles of physics, the design of blood-wetted prosthetic devices still remains a black art. Consequently, the infiltration of modern prescriptive design methods has been slow.