The Effects of Time Varying Curvature on Species Transport in Coronary Arteries

Alterations in mass transport patterns of low-density lipoproteins (LDL) and oxygen are known to cause atherosclerosis in larger arteries. We hypothesise that the species transport processes in coronary arteries may be affected by their physiological motion, a factor which has not been considered widely in mass transfer studies. Hence, we numerically simulated the mass transport of LDL and oxygen in an idealized moving coronary artery model under both steady and pulsatile flow conditions. A physiological inlet velocity and a sinusoidal curvature waveform were specified as velocity and wall motion boundary conditions. The results predicted elevation of LDL flux, impaired oxygen flux and low wall shear stress (WSS) along the inner wall of curvature, a predilection site for atherosclerosis. The wall motion induced changes in the velocity and WSS patterns were only secondary to the pulsatile flow effects. The temporal variations in flow and WSS due to the flow pulsation and wall motion did not affect temporal changes in the species wall flux. However, the wall motion did alter the time-averaged oxygen and LDL flux in the order of 26% and 12% respectively. Taken together, these results suggest that the wall motion may play an important role in coronary arterial transport processes and emphasise the need for further investigation

USING ATLAS OF HEART SHAPES FOR SIMULATION OF BLOOD FLOW IN LEFT VENTRICLE

Integrative modeling of cardiac system is important for understanding the complex biophysical function of the heart]. To this end, multimodal cardiovascular imaging plays an important role in providing the computational domain, the boundary/initial conditions, and tissue function and properties. In particular, the incorporation of blood flow in the physiological models can help to simulate the hemodynamic properties and their effects on cardiac function. In this paper, we present a multimodal framework for quantitative and subject-specific analysis of blood flow in the cardiac chambers, including the left ventricle (LV). The 3D geometries of the LV at different time steps are extracted from medical images using an atlas of LV shape. The motion of the myocardium wall is used to extract the moving boundary data of the computational geometry. The data is used as a constraint for the computational fluid dynamics (CFD). An arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) finite element method (FEM) formulation is used to derive a numerical solution of the transient dynamic equation of the fluid domain. With this method, simulation results describe detailed flow characteristics (such as velocity, pressure and wall shear stress) in the computational domain. The personalized hemodynamic characteristics obtained with the proposed approach can provide clinical value for diagnosis and treatment of abnormalities related to disturbed blood flow such as in myocardial remodeling and aortic sinus lesion formation.</p