A brain aneurysm is an abnormal ballooning, weakened and thin portion of a blood vessel. Nearly 50,000 people annually suffer from ruptured aneurysms in Europe alone, and more than half of these people die. Despite biological and biochemical properties, hemodynamic quantities (such as pressure and flow-induced wall shear stress) and mechanical properties (such as wall softness) are increasingly recognized to play an essential role in understanding the initiation, growth and rupture of the aneurysm.
In our recent paper in PLoS ONE we employed a hybrid lattice Boltzmann-finite element-immersed boundary method to investigate the interplay between the pulsatile blood flow and the aneurysm deformation. We found that the blood flow and the wall shear stress inside the aneurysm are affected by at least two different mechanisms: size and deformability of the aneurysm. Moreover, our simulations revealed that the flow velocity is not a good indicator for the wall shear stress particularly in pathological cases such as brain aneurysms.
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