Analysis of Blood Turbulent Flow in Carotid Artery Including the Effects of Mural Thrombosis Using Finite Element Modeling

Abstract

Arterial thrombosis is an extremely significant health problem. As a result of numerous factors involved in such problem, describing the role of hemodynamics in thrombogenesis has been asserted to be one of the most demanding and complicated challenges in biomechanics. An axisymmetric model considering fluid-structure interactions (FSI) was introduced and numerically solved for an artery with a thrombosis to perform flow and stress-strain analysis and investigate the probability of thrombus ruptures leading to embolization. Three models with different thrombus heights were considered and the Navier-Stokes equations were solved for the blood flow as the fluid domain. Results indicated that there are recirculation regions after thrombus bulk, which are susceptible to rethrombosis and stenosis. It was also shown that when the thrombus height increases, the shear stress magnitude on FSI boundary increases and the area near the thrombus peak is too susceptible to rupture. Besides, stress-strain distribution analysis demonstrated that by increasing the thrombus height, the region with high shear stress on the wall declines while the shear stress magnitude of the region under the peak increases up to 4 times. When the thrombus height is low enough (34% of artery diameter), its deformation is larger at the peak and a large area of its downstream side. However, by increasing the thrombus height, there are two sites of large deformation in thrombus at the peak and a small area at the leading edge (in compression site) of thrombus. These regions are vulnerable because of rupture probability.