Blood flow modeling in coronary arteries: a review

Abstract

Atherosclerosis is one of the main causes of cardiovascular events, namely, myocardium infarction and cerebral stroke, responsible for a great number of deaths every year worldwide. This pathology is caused by the progressive accumulation of low-density lipoproteins, cholesterol, and other substances on the arterial wall, narrowing its lumen. To date, many hemodynamic studies have been conducted experimentally and/or numerically; however, this disease is not yet fully understood. For this reason, the research of this pathology is still ongoing, mainly, resorting to computational methods. These have been increasingly used in biomedical research of atherosclerosis because of their high-performance hardware and software. Taking into account the attempts that have been made in computational techniques to simulate realistic conditions of blood flow in both diseased and healthy arteries, the present review aims to give an overview of the most recent numerical studies focused on coronary arteries, by addressing the blood viscosity models, and applied physiological flow conditions. In general, regardless of the boundary conditions, numerical studies have been contributed to a better understanding of the development of this disease, its diagnosis, and its treatment.