**1. Introduction**

Coronary heart diseases remain a prominent cause of morbidity and mortality [1]. Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is the current standard treatment and aims to widen the lumen, restore the blood flow into the vessel and consequently re-perfuse the ischaemic myocardium. A catheter is fed through the femoral artery until the blocked coronary and the balloon inflated. A stent is then placed and maintains the artery opened to limit adverse vessel remodelling and elastic recoil.

Since 2003, the standard of care is the balloon-expandable, drug-eluting metallic stent. Steady improvement of stent technology promoted a rapid evolution from the

first generation of the bare-metal stents (BMS, permanent metallic structure without drug release) to the last generation of drug-eluting stents (DES, permanent metallic structure with anti-proliferative drug release). The BMS and DES are mostly made of a cobalt-chromium alloy and remain lifelong in the artery of the patient. Several studies showed, however, that life-threatening complication, emerging several months or years after implantation, may occur, including restenosis due to neointimal hyperplasia and late in-stent thrombosis [2]. Novel therapeutic approaches to reduce persistent inflammation, stenosis and thrombosis are focused on antiproliferative and anti-inflammatory processes such as drug-eluting stents [3], pharmaceutical [4, 5] or laser-based approaches [6, 7] as well as bioresorbable stents [8].

In this context, an appropriate animal model is paramount to foster the development of new therapies, to provide in vivo preclinical proof of concept, to evaluate the treatment performance and to promote translation to the clinic. The rabbitinjured iliac artery model has been well established to investigate the vascular response to hyperplasia and stenosis or thrombosis [3, 8, 9].

In the present study, we evaluated the vascular responses to bilateral iliac artery injuries performed by balloon denudation and stent overexpansion, using a highresolution ultrasound imaging system. We explored the longitudinal evolution of the vessel morphometries and the blow flow.
