In Vivo Intravascular Optical Coherence Tomography (IVOCT) Structural and Blood Flow Imaging Based Mechanical Simulation Analysis of a Blood Vessel.

INTRODUCTION: Computer modelling of blood vessels based on biomedical imaging provides important hemodynamic and biomechanical information for vascular disease studies and diagnosis. However due to lacking well-defined physiological blood flow profiles, the accuracy of the simulation results is often not guaranteed. Flow velocity profiles of a specific cross section of a blood vessel were obtained by in vivo Doppler intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) lately. However due to the influence of the catheter, the velocity profile imaged by IVOCT can't be applied to simulation directly. METHODS: A simulation-experiment combined method to determine the inlet flow boundary based on in vivo porcine carotid Doppler IVOCT imaging is proposed. A single conduit carotid model was created from the 3D IVOCT structural images using an image processing-computer aided design combined method. RESULTS: With both high- resolution arterial model and near physiological blood flow profile, stress analysis by fluid-structure interaction and computational fluid dynamics were performed. The influence of the catheter to the wall shear stress, the hemodynamics and the stresses of the carotid wall under the measured inlet flow and various outlet pressure boundary conditions, are analyzed. CONCLUSION: This study provides a solution to the difficulty of getting inlet flow boundary for numerical simulation of arteries. It paves the way for developing IVOCT based vascular stress analysis and imaging methods for the studies and diagnosis of vascular diseases.