Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) is a common disease among Caucasian males above the age of 60 and its rupture is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. [1] An AAA is commonly defined as a 50% local increase in diameter of the normal infrarenal aorta, and is located below the renal arteries and the iliac bifurcation. At present the measured maximum diameter or the rate of increase of the diameter over time are used as clinical parameters to judge the suitability of surgical intervention to prevent rupture. As a clinical diagnosis rule, aneurysms with diameter less than 4 cm are kept under periodic surveillance and between 5 cm and 6 cm, or expansion rates greater than 1 cm / year, are recommended for surgical or endovascular intervention. Unfortunately, retrospective studies reveal that about 33% of ruptured aneurysms had a maximum diameter less than 5 cm at the time of the rupture [2]. This demonstrates that the correlation between a critical diameter and rupture risk assessment of AAAs has its limitations and thus opens the opportunity for further research on other critical parameters that may be suitable for future diagnosis and rupture prediction. Our ongoing computational efforts [3] focus on this issue as we propose the use of patient specific fluid-structure interaction (FSI) models to investigate the potential of individual flow-induced wall stress as a key biomechanical parameter that can be used for rupture risk evaluation. In this work we report on the setup of the computational protocol for patient specific analysis and assess the effect of modeling parameters on the derivation of individual inflow and outflow boundary conditions for AAA fluid flow simulation and validation.

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