A fluid-structure interaction study of hemodynamics in arterial bypass-graft anastomoses

Summary

This paper reports on numerical experiments on arterial bypass-graft anastomoses. Bypass-grafts are oftentimes used in surgical procedures to divert blood around narrowed or occluded parts of an artery. The diverted blood flow is crucial to the success of the operation as it may lead to undesirable peculiarities that can result to a renewed occlusion in the distal connection of the graft. However, an a priori prediction of detrimental hemodynamic aspects due to undesirable flow properties is difficult to perform in vitro or in vivo conditions. To this end, this work targets to enhance our understanding of harming mechanisms through in silico experiments using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations. The latter are realized through a partitioned coupled approach which is verified for a 2D benchmark case against literature-reported results. Finally, we present numerical results on grafts with different cuff sizes. Wall shear stress (WSS), oscillatory shear index (OSI) and hemolysis are monitored and compared in the context of either rigid or elastic walls and cuff sizes. Special interest is given to the prediction of hemolysis induction which is often not considered in such studies. We show that wall elasticity is the key parameter in terms of WSS prediction while cuff size mainly affects the estimation of OSI.

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