A low dimensional surrogate model for a fast estimation of strain in the thrombus during a thrombectomy procedure

• Published in: Journal of the mechanical behavior of biomedical materials 2023-01, Vol.137, p.105577-105577, Article 105577
• Main Authors: Bridio, Sara, Luraghi, Giulia, Migliavacca, Francesco, Pant, Sanjay, García-González, Alberto, Rodriguez Matas, Jose F.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acute ischemic stroke; Catheters; Finite element method; Humans; Ischemic Stroke; Kriging; Principal components analysis; Stents; Surrogate modeling; Thrombectomy; Thrombectomy - methods; Thrombosis
• ISSN: 1751-6161; 1878-0180
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jmbbm.2022.105577

Intra-arterial thrombectomy is the main treatment for acute ischemic stroke due to large vessel occlusions and can consist in mechanically removing the thrombus with a stent-retriever. A cause of failure of the procedure is the fragmentation of the thrombus and formation of micro-emboli, difficult to remove. This work proposes a methodology for the creation of a low-dimensional surrogate model of the mechanical thrombectomy procedure, trained on realizations from high-fidelity simulations, able to estimate the evolution of the maximum first principal strain in the thrombus. A parametric finite-element model was created, composed of a tapered vessel, a thrombus, a stent-retriever and a catheter. A design of experiments was conducted to sample 100 combinations of the model parameters and the corresponding thrombectomy simulations were run and post-processed to extract the maximum first principal strain in the thrombus during the procedure. Then, a surrogate model was built with a combination of principal component analysis and Kriging. The surrogate model was chosen after a sensitivity analysis on the number of principal components and was tested with 10 additional cases. The model provided predictions of the strain curves with correlation above 0.9 and a maximum error of 28%, with an error below 20% in 60% of the test cases. The surrogate model provides nearly instantaneous estimates and constitutes a valuable tool for evaluating the risk of thrombus rupture during pre-operative planning for the treatment of acute ischemic stroke.