The stability of blood vessels is essential for maintaining the normal arterial function, and loss of stability may result in blood vessel tortuosity. The previous theoretical models of artery buckling were developed for circular vessel models, but arteries often demonstrate geometric variations such as elliptic and eccentric cross-sections. The objective of this study was to establish the theoretical foundation for noncircular blood vessel bent (i.e., lateral) buckling and simulate the buckling behavior of arteries with elliptic and eccentric cross-sections using finite element analysis. A generalized buckling equation for noncircular vessels was derived and finite element analysis was conducted to simulate the artery buckling behavior under lumen pressure and axial tension. The arterial wall was modeled as a thick-walled cylinder with hyper-elastic anisotropic and homogeneous material. The results demonstrated that oval or eccentric cross-section increases the critical buckling pressure of arteries and having both ovalness and eccentricity would further enhance the effect. We conclude that variations of the cross-sectional shape affect the critical pressure of arteries. These results improve the understanding of the mechanical stability of arteries.
Myocardial bridging (MB) and coronary atherosclerotic stenosis can impair coronary blood flow and may cause myocardial ischemia or even stoke. It remains unclear how MB and stenosis are similar or different regarding their impacts on coronary hemodynamics. The purpose of this study was to compare the hemodynamic effects of MB and stenosis using experimental and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approaches. For CFD modeling, three MB patients with different levels of lumen obstruction such as mild, moderate, and severe were selected. Patient-specific left anterior descending coronary artery models were reconstructed from biplane angiograms. For each MB patient, the virtually healthy and stenotic models were also simulated for comparison. In addition, an in vitro flow-loop was developed to evaluate the model-predicted pressure drop. The CFD modeling results demonstrated that the difference between MB and stenosis increased with increasing MB/stenosis severity and flow rate. Experimental results showed that increasing the MB length (by 140%) only had significant impact on the pressure drop in the severe MB (39% increase at the exercise). However, increasing the stenosis length dramatically increased the pressure drop in both moderate and severe stenoses at all flow rates (31% and 93% increase at the exercise, respectively). Both CFD and experimental results confirmed that the MB had a higher maximum and a lower mean pressure drop in comparison with the stenosis, regardless of MB/stenosis severity. A better understanding of MB and stenosis may improve the therapeutic strategies in coronary disease patients and prevent acute coronary syndromes.
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