Impact of Residual Stress on Coronary Plaque Stress/strain Calculations Using Optical Coherence Tomography Image-based Multi-layer Models

Introduction: Mechanical stress and strain conditions play an important role in atherosclerosis plaque progression, remodeling and potential rupture and may be used in plaque vulnerability assessment for better clinical diagnosis and treatment decisions. Single layer plaque models without residual stress have been widely used due to unavailability of multi-layer image segmentation method and residual stress data. However, vessel layered structure and residual stress have large impact on stress/strain calculations and should be included in the models.

Methods: In this study, intravascular optical coherence tomography (OCT) data of coronary plaques from 10 patients were acquired and segmented to obtain the three-layer vessel structure using an in-house automatic segmentation algorithm. Multi- and single-layer 3D thin-slice biomechanical plaque models with and without residual stress were constructed to assess the impact of residual stress on stress/strain calculations.

Results: Our results showed that residual stress led to a more uniform stress distribution across the vessel wall, with considerable plaque stress/strain decrease on inner wall and increase on vessel out-wall. Multi-layer model with residual stress inclusion reduced inner wall maximum and mean plaque stresses by 38.57% and 59.70%, and increased out-wall maximum and mean plaque stresses by 572.84% and 432.03%.

Conclusion: These findings demonstrated the importance of multi-layer modeling with residual stress for more accurate plaque stress/strain calculations, which will have great impact in plaque cap stress calculation and plaque rupture risk assessment. Further large-scale studies are needed to validate our findings.