Numerical simulation of the fractional flow reserve (FFR)

¹ LERMA, Mohammadia Engineering School, Mohamed V University, Rabat, Morocco.
² Université Côte d’Azur, Inria, CNRS, LJAD, UMR 7351, Parc Valrose, 06108 Nice, France.
³ International Laboratory for Computer Sciences and Applied Mathematics LIRIMA.
⁴ Clinique Maarif - Cardiologie maarif, 20390 Casablanca, Morocco.
⁵ INRIA Bordeaux Sud Ouest, Carmen Project, France.

^* Corresponding author: aboulaich@gmail.com

Received: 8 February 2018
Accepted: 7 November 2018

Abstract

The fractional flow reserve (FFR) provides an efficient quantitative assessment of the severity of a coronary lesion. Our aim is to address the problem of computing non-invasive virtual fractional flow reserve (VFFR). In this paper, we present a preliminary study of the main features of flow over a stenosed coronary arterial portion, in order to enumerate the different factors affecting the VFFR. We adopt a non-Newtonian flow model and we assume that the two-dimensional (2D) domain is rigid in a first place. In a second place, we consider a simplified weakly coupled FSI model in order to take into account the infinitesimal displacements of the upper wall. A 2D finite element solver was implemented using Freefem++. We computed the VFFR profiles with respect to different lesion parameters and compared the results given by the rigid wall model to those obtained for the elastic wall one.