Physical Modeling and Computer Simulation of Balloon Angioplasty (START Y74)

Atherosclerosis is the most common disease of the artery wall. It inhibits blood supply to muscles, heart and other organs and may cause coronary heart disease, stroke or peripheral arterial occlusive disease. Balloon angioplasty with or without stenting is a well-established interventional method to reduce the severity of diseased arteries. Although angioplasty offers great benefits not only from the medical but also from the socio-economical point of view, it is clearly capable of improvement. The common concern is to find an optimal dilation strategy on a lesion-specific basis concerning all possible mechanisms of angioplasty including plaque fracture. The new approach, which we call Computer Aided Angioplasty (CAA), allows systematic investigations of the influence of procedural parameters on a (”virtual”) stenosis. It has the potential to (i) improve interventional treatment planning, (ii) guide therapeutic decisions, (iii) select lesion-specific dilation strategies, (iv) optimize the designs of interventional equipment (balloons, stents), (v) design new mechanical interventional devices, (vi) quantify mechanical injury etc. The crucial point is the mechanical model of the diseased artery. To achieve clinically relevant results, a model has to consider the three-dimensional, anisotropic and nonlinear mechanical responses of each of the arterial tissues involved. To solve these types of problems multidisciplinary cooperation is essential.