Abstract
Clinical management of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) can benefit from patient-specific computational biomechanics-based assessment of the disease. Individual variations in shape and aortic material properties are expected to influence the assessment of AAA wall mechanics. While patient-specific geometry can be reproduced using medical images, the accurate individual and regionally varying tissue material property estimation is currently not feasible. This work addresses the relative uncertainties arising from variations in AAA material properties and its effect on the ensuing wall mechanics. Computational simulations were performed with five different isotropic material models based on an ex-vivo AAA wall material characterization and a subject population sample of 28 individuals. Care was taken to exclude the compounding effects of variations in all other geometric and biomechanical factors. To this end, the spatial maxima of the principal stress (σ max), principal strain (ε max), strain-energy density (ψ max), and displacement (δ max) were calculated for the diameter-matched cohort of 28 geometries for each of the five different constitutive materials. This led to 140 quasi-static simulations, the results of which were assessed on the basis of intra-patient (effect of material constants) and inter-patient (effect of individual AAA shape) differences using statistical averages, standard deviations, and Box and Whisker plots. Mean percentage variations for σ max, ε max, ψ max, and δ max for the intra-patient analysis were 1.5, 7.1, 8.0, and 6.1, respectively, whereas for the inter-patient analysis these were 11.1, 4.5, 15.3, and 12.9, respectively. Changes in the material constants of an isotropic constitutive model for the AAA wall have a negligible influence on peak wall stress. Hence, this study endorses the use of population-averaged material properties for the purpose of estimating peak wall stress, strain-energy density, and wall displacement. Conversely, strain is more dependent on the material constant variation than on the differences in AAA shape in a diameter-matched population cohort.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge research funding from NIH grants R21EB007651, R21EB008804, and R15HL087268, and NSF grant HRD-0932339. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation. This research was also supported by an allocation of advanced computing resources supported by the National Science Foundation (Teragrid grant TG-CTS050051N). Some of the computations were performed on the Blacklight system at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.
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Raut, S.S., Jana, A., De Oliveira, V., Muluk, S.C., Finol, E.A. (2014). The Effect of Uncertainty in Vascular Wall Material Properties on Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Wall Mechanics. In: Doyle, B., Miller, K., Wittek, A., Nielsen, P. (eds) Computational Biomechanics for Medicine. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0745-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0745-8_6
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