ON THE DIFFERENT VELOCITIES OF INLET BOUNDARY CONDITIONS FOR HUMAN ARM ANALYSIS OF ARTERIAL FLOW USING ONE-WAY FLUID–SOLID COUPLING

Simulations for blood hydrodynamic problems have been still largely incomplete despite years of research, especially for the inlet of boundary conditions that served as an essential part in computational fluid dynamics simulations of blood flow in human arteries. In this paper, the four different velocities of inlet boundary conditions were tested and compared in the human arm arterial model developed by us previously. Based on the selected points of nine key areas in the blood model,[Formula: see text] we analyzed the calculation results of pressure and shear stress distributions in detail. Our results show that they are changeable in different [Formula: see text] (different peak velocities of inlet boundary). The results further show that the static pressure of the aortic tree is higher than the static pressure of the branch, while the shear stress of the aortic tree is lower than the shear stress of the branch. On the other hand, the velocities changed in different [Formula: see text], the vessel walls of max total deformation appear in the middle radial obviously, compared with the equivalent and shear stress show at the entrance and bifurcations. In all, the simulation results of the brachial arteries provide the wall deformation, pressure and shear stress characteristics in different [Formula: see text], and offer a new strategy to study the two-way coupling of hemodynamics in the arm arterial model.

Development of CT-Based Imaging Signature for Preoperative Prediction of Invasive Behavior in Pancreatic Solid Pseudopapillary Neoplasm

PurposeIt is challenging for traditional CT signs to predict invasiveness of pancreatic solid pseudopapillary neoplasm (pSPN). We aim to develop and evaluate CT-based radiomics signature to preoperatively predict invasive behavior in pSPN.MethodsEighty-five patients who had pathologically confirmed pSPN and preoperative contrasted-enhanced CT imaging in our hospital were retrospectively analyzed (invasive: 24; non-invasive: 61). 1316 radiomics features were separately extracted from delineated 2D or 3D ROIs in arterial and venous phases. 200% (SMOTE) was used to generate balanced dataset (invasive: 72, non-invasive: 96) for each phase, which was for feature selection and modeling. The model was internally validated in the original dataset. Inter-observer consistency analysis, spearman correlation, univariate analysis, LASSO regression and backward stepwise logical regression were mainly applied to screen the features, and 6 logistic regression models were established based on multi-phase features from 2D or 3D segmentations. The ROC analysis and Delong’s test were mainly used for model assessment and AUC comparison.ResultsIt retained 11, 8, 7 and 7 features to construct 3D-arterial, 3D-venous, 2D-arterial and 2D-venous model. Based on 3D ROIs, the arterial model (AUC: 0.914) performed better than venous (AUC: 0.815) and the arterial-venous combined model was slightly improved (AUC: 0.918). Based on 2D ROIs, the arterial model (AUC: 0.814) performed better than venous (AUC:0.768), while the arterial-venous combined model (AUC:0.893) performed better than any single-phase model. In addition, the 3D arterial model performed better than the best combined 2D model. The Delong’s test showed that the significant difference of model AUC existed in arterial models in original dataset (p = 0.019) while not in arterial-venous combined model (p=0.49) as comparing 2D and 3D ROIs.ConclusionThe arterial radiomics model constructed by 3D-ROI feature is potential to predict the invasiveness of pSPN preoperatively.

A novel human arterial wall-on-a-chip to study endothelial inflammation and vascular smooth muscle cell migration in early atherosclerosis

Mechanistic understanding of atherosclerosis is largely hampered by the lack of suitable in vitro human arterial model that recapitulates the arterial wall structure, and the interplay between different cell types...

Design and Experimental Validation of an Active Catheter for Endovascular Navigation

Endovascular techniques have many advantages but rely strongly on operator skills and experience. Robotically steerable catheters have been developed but few are clinically available. We describe here the development of an active and efficient catheter based on shape memory alloys (SMA) actuators. We first established the specifications of our device considering anatomical constraints. We then present a new method for building active SMA-based catheters. The proposed method relies on the use of a core body made of three parallel metallic beams and integrates wire-shaped SMA actuators. The complete device is encapsulated into a standard 6F catheter for safety purposes. A trial-and-error campaign comparing 70 different prototypes was conducted to determine the best dimensions of the core structure and of the SMA actuators with respect to the imposed specifications. The final prototype was tested on a silicon-based arterial model and on a 23 kg pig. During these experiments, we were able to cannulate the supra-aortic trunks and the renal arteries with different angulations and without any complication. A second major contribution of this paper is the derivation of a reliable mathematical model for predicting the bending angle of our active catheters. We first use this model to state some general qualitative rules useful for an iterative dimensional optimization. We then perform a quantitative comparison between the actual and the predicted bending angles for a set of 13 different prototypes. The relative error is less than 20% for bending angles between 100 deg and 150 deg, which is the interval of interest for our applications.