An approach to consider the arterial residual stresses in modelling of a patient-specific artery

In this work, the residual stress state of a human common carotid artery is predicted using the so-called thermomechanical analogy approach. The purpose of the approach is to enable consistent mapping of residual stresses and the respective configuration from a circular arterial segment to a patient-specific arterial geometry. This is achieved by applying proper volumetric dilatations to the actual arterial stress-free in vivo geometry, which makes use of the analogy that states that the bending stresses can be obtained on an equivalent manner by applying proper thermal dilatations. The common carotid artery data are obtained in vivo from a healthy 28-year-old man using non-invasive methods. The predicted residual stresses of the common carotid artery are in good quantitative agreement with the data from prior work in this field. The approach is validated by predicting the common carotid artery zero-stress state configuration, where a sector-like (cut-open) state is obtained. With this approach, it is thus possible to predict the residual stresses as well as the configuration of patient-specific arterial geometry without the need to model its cut-open zero-stress configuration.