Numerical study of blood flow in stented arteries: comparison of stent designs and viscosity models

Abstract

Atherosclerosis is a disease that is indirectly responsible for millions of deaths annually, and this condition is often treated with the implantation of stents, a medical device that is used to restore blood flow. This treatment inevitably brings changes in the local blood flow, since there is the introduction of a foreign element into the environment. It should be sought to ensure that the changes are minimal in order for the treatment to be effective and for the patients’ quality of life to be improved. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques are often used to study blood flow in arteries given that there is a great difficulty in doing studies in vivo.In this work, CFD was used to study blood flow in stented arteries, more specifically in the common carotid artery (CCA). Two distinct stent geometries (Stent A and B) were used to study the influence of the design aspects on local hemodynamics. The study also served to study the influence of the viscosity on the results, through the consideration of the Newtonian and Carreau viscosity models. The main conclusions of the work are the need for blood flow on stented arteries to modeled according to its non-Newtonian behavior and that stent A represents a more effective treatment for Atherosclerosis.