Diagnosing coronary plaque buildup faster with 1D models

The prevalence of coronary artery disease makes diagnosing plaque buildup in the heart a critical practice. Currently, clinicians use coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA), a heart imaging test, to determine if plaque has narrowed arteries. They plug that information into a 3D patient-specific model to examine the severity in a noninvasive manner.

However, 3D models come with a large computational cost, which can take hours to days to run on a supercomputer for a single patient. Hoque et al. present a 1D simulation that accomplishes the same task but runs 1,000 times faster.

The researchers considered appropriate boundary conditions for the inlet, outlet, and walls of the arteries. Using CCTA images, they determined the centerlines of arteries, which encapsulate the 3D characteristics of the coronary vessel geometry in just one dimension.

“The algorithm selects an initial point of a 3D model at the artery inlet and terminal point at the outlet,” said author Mohammad Ferdows. “Then, it propagates the point as a wave from the inlet to the outlet point. We describe the propagation with a nonlinear, hyperbolic partial differential equation.”

The model outputs hemodynamic parameters like velocity magnitude, pressure difference, and artery wall shear stress.

“We received consistent blood flow results in both approaches,” said Ferdows. “The main difference is the computational performance. The 3D method has more than 1,000 times the computational cost of the 1D method.”

The authors aim to make further improvements to the model to make it more realistic.

Source: “Hemodynamic characteristics expose the atherosclerotic severity in coronary main arteries: One-dimensional and three-dimensional approaches,” by K. E. Hoque, M. Ferdows, S. Sawall, E. E. Tzirtzilakis, and M. A. Xenos, Physics of Fluids (2021). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0069106 .