The interaction of blood flow and drug release for cardiovascular drug eluting stents and the numerical treatment of net flux boundary conditions
Event details
| Date | 13.02.2009 |
| Hour | 11:00 |
| Speaker | Prof. Paolo Zunino |
| Location |
MAA112
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Mass transport driven by intramural plasma filtration is the basic process to supply nourishment to the tissues of medium/small size arteries. In the last decades, this process has also been exploited to deliver drugs to arteries affected by atherosclerotic pathologies, such as coronary arteries. Drug eluting stents represent a recent and widespread example of this procedure. The design of these devices requires first of all to determine the correct drug dosage and release rate, which mainly depend on the transport properties of the substrate releasing the drug as well as on the biochemical interaction between the drug and the arterial tissue. More recently, preliminary computational studies have put into evidence that blood flow local features and drug deposition into the artery are correlated. These phenomena may also significantly interact with intramural plasma filtration. However, to our knowledge, such interplay has not yet been deeply investigated.
This study requires to perform classical hemodynamics simulations in specific, very localized vascular districts. It is well known that one of the main difficulties of such analysis is the prescription of suitable boundary conditions on the artificial inflow and outflow sections of the considered district. The application of net flux defective boundary conditions provides an effective solution to this difficulty. In the second part of this work, we discuss an efficient way to account of such conditions into standard finite element schemes for incompressible flows.
After a brief review of the problem and of its well posedness, we discretize the corresponding variational formulation by means of finite elements and looking at the boundary conditions as constraints, we exploit a penalty method to account for them.
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- Marco Discacciati