Effects of the initial configuration method on a predictive diagnostic analysis of abdominal aortic aneurysm

Abstract

In order to quantitative prediction of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) dilation, we proposed a novel prediction method using nodes on the surface of an finite element aneurysm model as tracking markers. In the proposed method, the current aneurysm shape was reproduced by expanding a hypothesized initial blood vessel FE model. Thus we evaluated the influence of the initial blood vessel configuration, mesh condition, and boundary condition on the node arrangement of expanded AAA model. The influence of the node arrangement was quantitatively compared using the maximum shear strain. As a result, it was found that the node arrangement when expanding the initial blood vessel model to the aneurysm shape depends on the initial blood vessel arrangement. Therefore, we proposed a method of arranging the initial blood vessel model, which is considered to have small artifacts in the node arrangement after expansion.