Wall-free modelling of atherosclerosis growth

This study presents a computational model, describing the formation and subsequent growth of atherosclerosis in its early stages. It is known that progressive mass aggregate of low-density lipoproteins (LDL) is an integral driving factor for the inflammatory process involved in atherosclerosis. Therefore, with the purpose of reducing computational costs for the evaluation of atherosclerosis distributions, the presented study models atherosclerosis growth as proportional to LDL aggregate. In doing so, the inflammatory process is not considered, and so mass conservation and a viable timescale are not realized. However, the model is shown to be effective for cases where time is not a variable of interest, and only the spatial distribution of atherosclerosis is sought. The model is tested on a two-dimensional bifurcating artery section, and is shown to provide satisfactory prediction of atherosclerosis lesion distributions.