Influence of Medial Collagen Organization and Axial In Situ Stretch on Saccular Cerebral Aneurysm Growth

A model for saccular cerebral aneurysm growth, proposed by Kroon and Holzapfel (2007, “A Model for Saccular Cerebral Aneurysm Growth in a Human Middle Cerebral Artery,” J. Theor. Biol., 247, pp. 775–787; 2008, “Modeling of Saccular Aneurysm Growth in a Human Middle Cerebral Artery,” ASME J. Biomech. Eng., 130, p. 051012), is further investigated. A human middle cerebral artery is modeled as a two-layer cylinder where the layers correspond to the media and the adventitia. The immediate loss of media in the location of the aneurysm is taken to be responsible for the initiation of the aneurysm growth. The aneurysm is regarded as a development of the adventitia, which is composed of several distinct layers of collagen fibers perfectly aligned in specified directions. The collagen fibers are the only load-bearing constituent in the aneurysm wall; their production and degradation depend on the stretch of the wall and are responsible for the aneurysm growth. The anisotropy of the surrounding media was modeled using the strain-energy function proposed by Holzapfel et al. (2000, “A New Constitutive Framework for Arterial Wall Mechanics and a Comparative Study of Material Models,” J. Elast., 61, pp. 1–48), which is valid for an elastic material with two families of fibers. It was shown that the inclusion of fibers in the media reduced the maximum principal Cauchy stress and the maximum shear stress in the aneurysm wall. The thickness increase in the aneurysm wall due to material growth was also decreased. Varying the fiber angle in the media from a circumferential direction to a deviation of 10 deg from the circumferential direction did, however, only show a little effect. Altering the axial in situ stretch of the artery had a much larger effect in terms of the steady-state shape of the aneurysm and the resulting stresses in the aneurysm wall. The peak values of the maximum principal stress and the thickness increase both became significantly higher for larger axial stretches.