A Framework for Fluid-Solid-Growth Modeling and its Application to Understanding the Enlargement of a Fusiform Aneurysm

Blood vessels adapt in response to changes in their biomechanical and biochemical environment under various physiological and pathological conditions. While advances in computational hemodynamics and arterial wall mechanics have been spectacular, such advances have been achieved separately; there is, therefore, a pressing need for coupling biosolid and biofluid mechanics within a computationally efficient framework to study effects of fluid-solid interactions (FSI) in growth and remodeling (G&R) of the vessel wall. Toward this end, we built a fluid-solid-growth (FSG) modeling framework [1] that incorporates four separate advances by our groups: biomechanics of G&R [2], a coupled momentum method for FSI during a cardiac cycle [3], a theory of small on large for coupling G&R and FSI models [4], and improved approaches for modeling fluid boundary conditions in complex vascular systems [5]. Although the framework presented here is sufficiently general to apply to many different vascular adaptation problems, we first apply this framework to a fusiform aneurysm with a simple geometry.