Oct. 2 via HPCWire — Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a vascular disease that affects tens of thousands of people around the world each year. The disease occurs most commonly in men over 60, and is characterized by a dilation of the abdominal aortic wall and often a persistent blood clot.
The aorta is the largest artery in the body; it allows oxygenated blood to be distributed to organs and tissues throughout the body. Aneurysms, or localized dilatations, can form in the ascending or descending portions of the aorta within the chest or within the descending portion in the abdomen. Abdominal aneurysms are more common and when they rupture, they are often lethal.
Because aneurysms are stressed by the continuous action of changing blood pressures, methods of engineering that were developed to study the flow of viscous fluids (e.g., blood) and the failure of structures (rupture of the aorta) can be used to help understand the complex history of these deadly lesions. Once an AAA ruptures, death is nearly inevitable due to extreme internal bleeding, signifying the critical need to predict which aneurysms are most vulnerable.
To understand why some AAAs rupture and others do not, researchers must first understand better how they form and enlarge, digging deep into both the micro and macro levels to understand the complex interactions that define the disease.
One group attempting to accomplish this task is the Continuum Biomechanics Lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. Using computational models in combination with biological experiments, researchers in the lab can study AAA development at both the micro and macro scales.
Jay Humphrey, professor of biomedical engineering, emphasizes that “the biological and mechanical complexity of AAAs demands a multidisciplinary team to advance our understanding.” George Tellides, professor of surgery and Andrew Sherman at the Yale Center for Research Computing, teamed up with Humphrey to enable the development of patient-specific computational models for multiple aspects of AAAs. They, in combination with post-doctoral fellows and Ph.D. students have recently put forth new hypotheses on factors that drive intraluminal, or interior areas of the artery, clotting as well as the mechanobiological stability of the diseased aortas.