A pragmatic approach to understand peripheral artery lumen surface stiffness due to plaque heterogeneity

Abstract

The goal of this study was to develop a pragmatic approach to build patient-specific models of the peripheral artery that are aware of plaque inhomogeneity. Patient-specific models using element-specific material definition (to understand the role of plaque composition) and homogeneous material definition (to understand the role of artery diameter and thickness) were automatically built from intravascular ultrasound images of three artery segments classified with low, average, and high calcification. The element-specific material models had average surface stiffness values of 0.0735, 0.0826, and 0.0973 MPa/mm, whereas the homogeneous material models had average surface stiffness values of 0.1392, 0.1276, and 0.1922 MPa/mm for low, average, and high calcification, respectively. Localization of peak lumen stiffness and differences in patient-specific average surface stiffness for homogeneous and element-specific models suggest the role of plaque composition on surface stiffness in addition to local arterial diameter and thickness.

Keywords:

• Finite element
• IVUS
• patient-specific
• peripheral artery disease
• plaque
• surface stiffness

Acknowledgments

The authors deeply appreciate efforts by Craig Bennetts to realize this work. Mr. Bennetts laid down the foundations of the analysis scripts utilized in this study and the team leveraged several conference abstracts presented by Mr. Bennetts during his time with the team (Bennetts et al. 2013; Bennetts, CJ et al. 2013) to inform this manuscript. The authors would also like to acknowledge Paul Bishop for his assistance in IVUS image collection.

Disclosure statement

AE owns innodof, LLC, a consulting company for modeling and simulation. Other co-authors do not have conflicts of interest to declare.

Additional information

Funding

The work has been supported by National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institutes of Health (R01EB018965; Principal Investigator: Melissa Young).