Smooth contact strategies with emphasis on the modeling of balloon angioplasty with stenting

Abstract

Critical to the simulation of balloon angioplasty is the modeling of the contact between the artery wall and the medical devices. In standard approaches, the 3D contact surfaces are described by means of C0-continuous facet-based techniques, which may lead to numerical problems. This work introduces a novel contact algorithm where the target surfaces are described by polynomial expressions with C2-continuity. On the basis of uniform cubic B-splines, two different parametrization techniques are presented and compared, while the related implementation of the algorithm into a finite element analysis program is described. Two numerical examples are selected to demonstrate the special merits of the proposed contact formulation. The first example is a benchmark contact problem selected to point out the special features of the proposed strategies. The second example is concerned with the simulation of balloon angioplasty and stenting, where the contact between the balloon, the stent and the artery wall is numerically modeled. A patient-specific 3D model of a stenotic femoral artery serves as a basis. The study concludes by identifying the changes in the mechanical environment of the artery in terms of contact forces and strains by considering two different stent designs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.