Influence of Morphometric and Mechanical Factors in Thoracic Aorta Finite Element Modeling
Résumé
Evaluation of mechanical properties from thoracic aorta finite element (FE) modeling can help to better stratify patients in need of intervention. This paper assesses the influence of various factors in the configuration of a FE model focused on the ascending aorta. Essential factors including morphological descriptors, material elasticity, boundary conditions (BCs), and load are investigated on a synthetic aorta model. Based on representative values retrieved from literature, the impact of these factors is studied using statistical hypothesis testing (one-way ANOVA). Our results show that wall thickness, blood pressure, ascending aorta diameter, and material elasticity have the most dominant impacts onto the aortic stress distributions. Such an information is useful to properly configure patient-specific thoracic aorta FE modeling.