Rapid coronary artery stent computational simulation using the simplex deformable model

The objective of this study was to present and demonstrate the feasibility of a simplex deformable model (SDM) for patient-specific coronary stent simulations in two patient-specific cases. Patient-specific 3D artery anatomies were converted into triangular meshes and then transformed into 2-simplex meshes. For each vertex, three neighboring vertices were used to compute outward and inward normal vectors to model stent expansion and arterial wall resistance. Internal forces representing stent mechanics were computed during expansion, and external forces incorporating non-linear hyperelastic arterial behavior were applied after stent-wall contact. Two patient-specific arteries were simulated using the SDM framework, with the finite element method (FEM) as the reference. Relative to FEM, the SDM achieved 360-670 times faster computational time, and reduced vertex counts by 9.5-12.6 times. Bland-Altman analysis showed small mean biases in mean lumen diameter (-0.029 mm for Artery 1;-0.043 mm for Artery 2), and root mean square error was small (0.063 mm for Artery 1; 0.098 mm for Artery 2), and the mean absolute relative error was also low (1.75% for Artery 1; 2.31% for Artery 2). In conclusion, this proof-of-concept study in two patient-specific 3D coronary anatomies suggests that the proposed SDM-based simulations can achieve overall agreement with FEM, while substantially reducing computational time and mesh size.