Title: MULTI-SCALE MODELING OF BLOOD VESSELS USING A FLUID-SOLID GROWTH FRAMEWORK

Abstract:

Blood vessels adapt and remodel in response to changes in their mechanical and biochemical environment during development and aging, and with diseases including atherosclerosis, aneurysms, and hypertension to name just a few examples. While computational methods have been utilized separately to quantify hemodynamic conditions and to simulate growth and remodeling processes, there is a pressing need for a unified approach to model vascular adaptation and disease in response to biomechanical and biochemical stimuli. This class of Fluid Solid Growth (FSG) problems are inherently multi scale in time since the biomechanical forces due to the heart beat change on the scale of seconds whereas vascular adaptation can occur over days to weeks and diseases progress over months to years. In addition, FSG problems are multi scale in space since biomechanical forces and biochemical stimuli, sensed at a molecular and cellular scale, elicit adaptive and maladaptive responses from molecular to organ scales. We describe herein a novel computational method to model fluid solid growth problems and illustrate this method by applying it to simulate the enlargement of a cerebral vascular aneurysm in response to shear and tensile stress.