Abstract
Balloon angioplasty is a well-established technique to treat lesions in the common and external iliac arteries. A potential unfavorable post-operative outcome of this procedure is rupture of the diseased artery wall. The objective of our study was to virtually evaluate the biomechanical responses of the diseased iliac artery wall resulting from deployment of a balloon, using finite-element analysis. To achieve this, we created a three-dimensional, anatomically accurate finite-element model of the diseased iliac artery. We prestressed the artery wall and computed the balloon-expansion induced stresses in the artery and plaque for different calcification levels. Our analyses showed that the vessel wall prestress was one order of magnitude smaller than those resulting from balloon expansion. Interestingly, our analyses also showed that moderate calcification levels result in higher arterial stresses when compared to those arising from low and heavy calcification levels. The results of our computational study could potentially assist in enhancing the design characteristics of angioplasty balloons to minimize the risk of post-operative iliac artery rupture.
