A computational method to assess the in vivo stresses and unloaded configuration of patient-specific blood vessels

In the modelling process of cardiovascular diseases, one often comes across the numerical simulation of the blood vessel wall. When the vessel geometry is patient-specific and is obtained in vivo via medical imaging, the stress distribution throughout the vessel wall is unknown. However, simulating the full physiological pressure load inside the blood vessel without incorporating the in vivo stresses will result in an inaccurate stress distribution and an incorrect deformation of the vessel wall. In this work a computational method is formulated to restore the zero-pressure geometry of patient-specific blood vessels, and to recover the in vivo stress field of the loaded structures at the moment of imaging. The proposed backward displacement method is able to solve the inverse problem iteratively using fixed point iterations. As only an update of the mesh is required, the formulation of this method allows for a straightforward implementation in combination with existing structural solvers, even if the structural solver is a black box.