Stenting As Heterogeneous Porous Media

Abstract

An intracranial aneurysm is an abnormal dilation of a cerebral artery or vein caused by a weakness of the vessel wall and the blood flow. This dilatations are treated by changing local haemodynamics to reduce flow, reducing stress at the walls and causing a thrombosis. Flow diverter stents are endovascular devices placed in the parent blood vessel to divert blood flow away from the aneurysm itself (Pierot L., J Neurorad, 38(1):40–46 (2011)). Computational fluid dynamics is a non invasive method to study flow diverters and its influence in local haemodynamics. There are many methods in literature representing stents as homogeneous porous media. However, deployed stents change its shape
heterogeneously according to vessel geometry. The shape deformation cause a variation in porosity and permeability across the device (Dazeo N. et al., Int J Num Meth Biomed Eng, 34(12):e3145 (2018).). In this work, porous medium methods are adapted to take local properties and create a heterogeneous medium. The methods are then compared qualitatively and quantitatively.