Model-based shear stress gradient in realistic vascular flows and its relation to arterial macromolecular permeability

Evans blue dye (EBD) was injected into the carotid arteries of three anesthetized pigs and allowed to circulate for 90 minutes. At the conclusion of the 90-minute period, the animals were sacrificed and injection casts of the infrarenal aorta and iliac-femoral arteries were prepared. The casts with their surrounding arteries were removed and immersed in fixative. After fixation, the EBD-stained vessels were separated from the casts, which were used to construct computational meshes for simulation of the flow fields and wall shear stress distributions that had existed in the casted regions during the experiments. The inlet flow waves and flow partitions were based on flow measurements performed during each experiment. Based on a conceptual model of the relation between shear stress nonuniformity and permeability increase, the spatial and angular variation of the gradient of the time-average shear stress at the walls of the external iliac arteries was found from the computational fluid dynamic simulations for each experiment. Using affine transformations, the gradient and time-average shear stress results, and the EBD optical density distributions, were mapped to a common template, allowing pixel-by-pixel correlations of the hemodynamic stress parameters and local permeability. The results suggest that both shear stress gradient and time-average shear play a role in determining vascular permeability to macromolecules.

Duke Scholars

Author Morton Friedman Biomedical Engineering