Analysis of Blood Stasis for Stent Thrombosis Using an Advection-Diffusion Lattice Boltzmann Scheme

An advection-diffusion solver was applied to assess how stent strut shape and position impact the development of a pro-thrombotic region within the stented human artery. Presented here is a suitably parameterised advection-diffusion equation with a source term that is spatially uniform within a certain sub-domain of interest to compute a “time concentration”. The latter will serve as a surrogate quantity for the “age” of fluid parcels, i.e., the time the fluid parcel has spent in the sub-domain. This is a particularly useful concept in the context of coronary artery haemodynamics, where “stasis of blood” (or residence time) is recognized as the most important factor in thrombotic initiation. The novel method presented in this work has a very straightforward and convenient single lattice Boltzmann simulation framework encapsulation. A residence time surrogate is computed, presented and correlated with a range of traditional haemodynamic metrics (wall shear stress, shear rate and re-circulation region shapes) and finally, the role of these data to quantify the risk of thrombus formation is assessed.