Analysis of Blood Stasis for Stent Thrombosis using an Advection-Diffusion Lattice Boltzmann Scheme

An advection-diffusion solver has been applied to assess how stent strut shape and position impact the development of a pro-thrombotic region within the stented human artery. We use a suitably parameterised advection-diffusion equation with a source term that is spatially uniform within a certain sub-domain of interest, to compute a ``time concentration''. The latter will serve as a surrogate quantity for ``age'' of fluid parcels, i.e., the time the fluid parcel has spent in the sub-domain. This is a particularly useful concept in the context of coronary artery haemodynamics, where blood stasis (or residence time) is recognised as the most important factor in thrombotic initiation. Our novel method has a very straightforward and convenient single lattice Boltzmann simulation framework encapsulation. We compute, present and correlate our residence time surrogate with a range of traditional haemodynamic metrics (wall shear stress, shear rate and re-circulation region shapes) and finally assess how these data can be used to quantify the risk of thrombus formation.