Gador Canton1, Huijun Chen1,
Minako Oikawa2, Hunter R. Underhill1, Wei Yu3,
Thomas S. Hatsukami4, Chun Yuan1, William Sean Kerwin1
1Radiology, University of Washington,
Seattle, WA, United States; 2Cardiovascular Medicine, Tohoku
University, Sendai, Japan; 3Radiology, Beijing Anzhen Hospital,
Beijing, China; 4Surgery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA,
United States
The
aim of this study was to explore the hypothesis that intra-plaque hemorrhage,
a feature associated with adverse outcomes and atherosclerotic plaque
progression, is more likely to occur in plaques with elevated levels of wall
shear stress (WSS). We used multi-sequence MRI to characterize seven human
carotid atherosclerotic plaques and an MRI-based computational fluid dynamics
(CFD) model to solve the equations governing the blood flow. The results from
this pilot study indicate a possible link between the presence of hemorrhage
within a lipid-rich necrotic core in human carotid atherosclerotic plaques
and the shear stress force acting on the luminal surface.