Analyzing Patient-Specific Coronary Arteries with and without Stents using Proper Orthogonal Decomposition

Incompressible transient CFD is run on patient-specific coronary arteries extracted from angiograms and intravascular ultrasound. The snapshot proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method is used to generate POD modes for the patients' arteries, before and after stent placement. An examination of the highest energy modes highlight the areas of concern and illustrate the success of the stent procedure. It is shown that most of the dynamics of the diseased coronary arteries can be captured in the fewer than five modes, and less for the arteries with proper stent placement. Wall shear stress (WSS) distributions are examined as a high frictional force exerted parallel to coronary arterial walls may lead to or make plaque development worse. The POD modes generated from the patient-specific study are to be used in combination with machine learning techniques to develop predictive and diagnostic tools for healthcare in future work.