Hemodynamic Investigation of Blood Flow in Left Coronary Artery (LCA) with Different Levels of Stenosis.

The hemodynamic investigation of the abnormalities present at the arterial wall can be incorporated by employing various factors. In this work, the three-dimensional computational model of coronary artery procured from CT/MRI data of healthy patients is simulated. A comparative study is performed with a variating degree of stenosis based on hemodynamic factors. The blood is regarded as incompressible non-Newtonian Carreau fluid. Furthermore, the finite volume method (FVM) is implemented to solve the discretized mathematical equations and obtain a numerical solution. Wall shear stress (WSS), wall pressure gradient (WPG), and oscillatory shear index (OSI) play an eminent part in concluding the level of atherosclerotic plaque existence and hence these are discussed in this work. It is observed that the most diseased artery acquired the peak value of 3.63 Pa of WSS, at the blocked region. The maximal notable WPG range is 9000 to 39 000 N/m3, corresponding to the artery with the highest level of stenosis at mid-systole. The OSI contours reflected the oscillatory behavior of WSS and inherited the values between 0 and 0.4. Results derived from the present numerical solution indicate that high–low WSS and WPG can be strongly linked to atherosclerosis plaque existence. In this study, we analyze the comparative hemodynamic investigation of blood flow in different blocked models of 3D realistic coronary arteries under the same boundary conditions. This makes it a novel work in cardiovascular disease. A three-dimensional computational coronary artery model is derived from the CT scan data of healthy patient. Further, various coronary models of 20%, 40%, 60% and 80% constriction are constructed. Mathematical model of blood flow is performed applying computational fluid dynamics techniques to perform the comparative analysis based on hemodynamic parameters such as Wall Shear Stress (WSS), Oscillatory Shear Index (OSI) and Wall Pressure Gradient (WPG). High value of WSS and WPG indicates the existence of plaque while high value of OSI pinpoints the areas vulnerable to plaque formation. These observations can prove a good source of information to medical practitioners for gaining insightful knowledge patient's current situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]