An aortic arch flow loop for the study of hemodynamic induced endothelial cell injury and inflammation -

Abstract

Atherosclerosis is a major cardiovascular disease which develops on the interior wall of a blood artery particularly at locations where geometric features like bends exist. In this work, we present the design and implementation of an aortic arch model in a flow loop in order to simulate blood flow in aorta. The main objective is to investigate the characteristics of the flow in an aortic arch and figure out some significant hemodynamic flow quantities like wall shear stress. Refractive index matching PIV is used for the determination of velocity patterns in the model. PIV have proved the presence of deceleration behavior of the flow in the near-inner wall boundary, the fact that led to low shear stress magnitudes at these regions. While acceleration behavior of the flow have been proved on the near-outer wall boundary which led to higher shear stress levels than those at the inner boundary. Endothelial cells were cultured on the lower and upper walls of the aortic lumen and the system was made to run under flow conditions. Signal identification and quantification tests have explored the occurrence of specific expressions of proteins, more prominent in the lower wall region. This finding explains the low shear stress levels obtained by PIV post-processing at the mentioned location. Given that, there exists a strong correlation between the hemodynamic forcing level of flow with Endothelial cell response and function.