FEM modeling to evaluate the effect of plaque formation over the temperature and blood flow

Abstract

The global prevalence of peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is 3-10%, which can increase to 15-20% from the age of 70 and has an annual mortality of 4-6%. This disease can trigger more serious problems, such as poor circulation, diabetic foot, amputations.The objective is to understand the relationship between the generation of plaque inside the arteries with variations in blood flow and its temperature, creating a computational simulation based on the finite element method, for which the flow pressure, the flow velocity and heat transfer to nearby tissues, taking the size of the radius of the artery as a multiparametric variable.The change in the size of the arterial radius patient simulates a healthy one if the artery is wide and the reduction of the arterial radius simulates a patient with plaque formation.The results obtained with these simulations show that the velocity decreases when the arterial radius is reduced, which simulates a patient with blood problems, on the other hand, the flow pressure decreases if the patient is healthy. The temperature analysis gives us information about the behavior of the tissues, a decrease in temperature could indicate that there is ischemia or some disease.