Rupture of atherosclerotic plaque, which is related to maximal stress conditions in the plaque among others, is a major cause of mortality. More careful examination of stress distributions in atherosclerotic plaques reports that it could be due to local stress behaviors at critical sites caused by cap thinning, inflammation, macroscopic heterogeneity, and recently, the presence of microcalcifications. However, the role of microcalcifications is not yet fully understood, and most finite element models of blood vessels with atheroma plaque ignore the heterogeneity of the plaque constituents at the microscale. The goal of this work is to investigate the effect of microcalcifications on the stress field of an atheroma plaque vessel section. This is achieved by performing a parametric finite element study, assuming a plane strain hypothesis, of a coronary artery section with eccentric atheroma plaque and one microcalcification incorporated. The geometrical parameters used to define and design the idealized coronary plaque anatomy and the microcalcification were the fibrous cap thickness and the microcalcification ratio, angle and eccentricity. We could conclude that microcalcifications should be considered in the modeling of this kind of problems since they cause a significant alteration of the vulnerable risk by increasing the maximum maximal principal stress up to 32%, although this increase of stress is not uniform (12% on average). The obtained results show that the fibrous cap thickness, the microcalcification ratio and the microcalcification eccentricity, in combination with the microcalcification angle, appear to be the key morphological parameters that play a determinant role in the maximal principal stress and accordingly in the rupture risk of the plaque.
Keywords: Parametric finite element analysis; coronary disease; hyperelastic material; microcalcifications; vulnerable plaque.