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Maximum Principal AAA Wall Stress Is Proportional to Wall Thickness

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Computational Biomechanics for Medicine

Abstract

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a permanent and irreversible dilation of the lower region of the aorta. It is an asymptomatic condition which if left untreated can expand to the point of rupture. Rupture of an artery will occur when the local wall stress exceeds the local wall strength. Therefore, estimation of a patient’s AAA wall stress non-invasively, quickly, and reliably is desirable. One solution to this problem is to use recently-published methods to compute AAA wall stress, using geometry from CT scans, and median arterial pressure as the load. Our method is embedded in the software platform BioPARR—Biomechanics based Prediction of Aneurysm Rupture Risk, freely available from http://bioparr.mech.uwa.edu.au/. Experience with over 50 patient-specific stress analyses, as well as common sense, suggests that the AAA wall stress is critically dependent on the local AAA wall thickness. This thickness is currently very difficult to measure in the clinical environment. Therefore, we conducted a simulation study to elucidate the relationship between the wall thickness and the maximum principal stress. The results of the analysis of three cases presented here unequivocally demonstrate that this relationship is approximately linear, bringing us closer to being able to compute predictive stress envelopes for every patient.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We are indebted to Dr. Johann Drexl from Fraunhofer MEVIS for his comments on the results.

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Acknowledgments

The financial support of the National Health and Medical Research Council (Grant No. APP1063986) is gratefully acknowledged. We wish to acknowledge the Raine Medical Research Foundation for funding G. R. Joldes through a Raine Priming Grant, and the Department of Health, Western Australia, for funding G. R. Joldes through a Merit Award. The AAA data has been obtained from the MA3RS study [22].

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intelligent Systems for Medicine Laboratory, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Perth, WA, Australia

    K. Miller, J. Qian, A. P. Patel, M. S. Jung, A. C. R. Tavner & A. Wittek

  2. School of Engineering and Information Technology, Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA, Australia

    G. R. Joldes

  3. Intelligent Systems for Medicine Laboratory, School of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Perth, WA, Australia

    G. R. Joldes

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  1. K. Miller
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  2. G. R. Joldes
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  3. J. Qian
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  4. A. P. Patel
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  5. M. S. Jung
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  6. A. C. R. Tavner
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  7. A. Wittek
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to K. Miller .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Auckland Bioengineering Institute, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Poul M. F. Nielsen

  2. Intelligent Systems for Medicine Laboratory, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Perth, WA, Australia

    Adam Wittek

  3. Intelligent Systems for Medicine Laboratory, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Perth, WA, Australia

    Karol Miller

  4. Vascular Engineering Laboratory, The University of Western Australia, Crawley-Perth, WA, Australia

    Barry Doyle

  5. Intelligent Systems for Medicine Laboratory, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Perth, WA, Australia

    Grand R. Joldes

  6. Auckland Bioengineering Institute, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Martyn P. Nash

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Miller, K. et al. (2019). Maximum Principal AAA Wall Stress Is Proportional to Wall Thickness. In: Nielsen, P., Wittek, A., Miller, K., Doyle, B., Joldes, G., Nash, M. (eds) Computational Biomechanics for Medicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75589-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75589-2_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-75588-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-75589-2

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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