Impact of coronary tortuosity on the artery hemodynamics

Publication date: Available online 22 April 2019Source: Biocybernetics and Biomedical EngineeringAuthor(s): Abdulrajak Buradi, Arun MahalingamAbstractThe presence of tortuosity in coronary artery (CA) affects the local wall shear stress (WSS) which is an influencing hemodynamic descriptor (HD) for the development of atherosclerotic sites. To conduct a morphological parametric study in coronary arteries (CAs), several idealized tortuous artery models were obtained by varying three morphological indices namely, curvature radius (CR), distance between two bends (DBB) and the angle of bend (AoB). Computational fluid dynamics methodology with multiphase mixture theory is used to explore the effect of coronary tortuosity on various WSS based hemodynamic descriptors (HDs) namely, time-averaged WSS, oscillatory shear index, time-averaged WSS gradient, endothelial cell activation potential and the relative residence time that are used to determine the vulnerable locations for the onset of thrombosis and atherosclerosis. Our findings suggest that all the tortuosity morphological indices, CR, DBB and AoB have significant influence on the distributions of various HDs and hemodynamics. It is also observed that atherosclerosis prone sites were witnessed at the inner artery wall at downstream regions of the bend section 1 and bend section 2 in all the tortuous artery models studied and found to increase as the CR and DBB were reduced however, found to increase as the AoB is increased. Hence...
Source: Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering - Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research