Blood vessel tissue prestress modeling for vascular fluid-structure interaction simulation

In this paper we present a new strategy for obtaining blood vessel tissue prestress for use in fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis of vascular blood flow. The method consists of a simple iterative procedure and is applicable to a large class of vascular geometries. The formulation of the solid problem is modified to account for the tissue prestress by employing an additive decomposition of the second Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor. Computational results using patient-specific models of cerebral aneurysms indicate that tissue prestress plays an important role in predicting hemodynamic quantities of interest in vascular FSI simulations. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.