CFD simulation of blood flow inside the corkscrew collaterals of the Buerger’s disease

Abstract

Introduction: Buerger’s disease is an occlusive arterial disease that occurs mainly in medium and small vessels. This disease is associated with Tobacco usage. The existence of corkscrew collateral is one of the established characteristics of the Buerger’s disease.
Methods: In this study, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of blood flow within the corkscrew artery of the Buerger’s disease is conducted. The geometry of the artery is constructed based on the actual corkscrew artery of a patient diagnosed with the Buerger’s disease. The blood properties are the same as the actual blood properties of the patient. The blood flow rate is taken from the available experimental data in the literature.
Results: The local velocity patterns, pressure and kinematic viscosity distributions in different segments of the corkscrew collateral artery was demonstrated and discussed for the first time for this kind of artery. The effects of non-Newtonian consideration for the blood viscosity behavior were investigated in different segments of the artery. Moreover, the variations of the blood flow patterns along the artery were investigated in details for each segment.
Conclusion: It was found that the flow patterns were affected by the complex geometry of this artery in such a way that it could lead to the presence of sites that were prone to the accumulation of the flowing particles in blood like nicotine. Furthermore, due to the existence of many successive bends in this artery, the variations of kinematic viscosity along this artery were significant, therefore the non-Newtonian behavior of the blood viscosity must be considered.

Keywords: Blood flow patterns, Buerger’s disease, Corkscrew collateral, Numerical modelling, Non-Newtonian viscosity