A stress estimation method with current configuration for arbitrary curvilinear surfaces and its application to risk evaluation of aortic diseases

Abstract

The stress analysis on the aortic wall can be used as a diagnostic tool to evaluate the degree of risk for aortic diseases like aortic aneurysm. However, it is difficult to obtain accurate material parameters in vivo and the geometry of aortic wall in unloaded condition. In this study, we propose a simple technique to evaluate the stress distribution along the aortic wall which requires only the current shape of the inner wall and the corresponding blood pressure as input data. We investigated the validity of this approach by comparing the stress distributions of torus structures and aortic models analyzed by this approach with those analyzed by the three-dimensional hyper-elastic stress analysis, and satisfactory results were obtained.